[In the following review, Als commends Brodkey's unique narrative style.]

A penchant for projecting my life into the margins of almost any writer's text was tempered when, at the age of twenty-three, I discovered Harold Brodkey's fiction, in this magazine. The publication of his long story “Nonie,” in 1984, alerted me to the presence of one who clearly owned the page his work appeared on:

Did Nonie feel real pain? Nonie was often miserable psychically—and she had bad monthly cramps. She was dramatic over scratches, cuts, her periods, and being snubbed. … Did she feel pain to match the pain she caused? Or was it that any pain triggered her demand for justice? She burned to death—maybe that hurt. … Do you love your sister? Probably. It's enjoined. I still don't care much what happened to her. If I love her or forgive her or whatever, it doesn't mean I want her to come back—I don't want to be with her. Any forgiveness going, she always used for her purposes. I can't go through that anymore—you know how it is.

Brodkey's syntax—idiosyncratic, monumental, an inimitable kind of music—conveyed many things simultaneously: that the phrase “dysfunctional family” is pleonastic; that American colloquial speech can convey expansive thought; that a literature documenting the awful in everyday life can have the stately force of Greek tragedy; that truly personal writing necessitates throwing off the social constraint of “niceness,” and speaking without permission.

Harold Brodkey's superb novel Profane Friendship, recently published in paperback, reiterates those lessons. It takes place in Venice—a Venice that, as the narrator, Niles O'Hara, recalls it many years later, “moves and shifts and crumbles as the buildings do.” Venice first became Niles's adopted home during his childhood in the nineteen-thirties. As a boy, Niles also wanted to “move and shift,” in part to avoid the bitterness that his father, a second-rate novelist, harbored toward the artistic success of his contemporaries and former friends Ernest Hemingway and John O'Hara. It was their success that galvanized the snobbish Dennis O'Hara to move his family to Europe. “Poor Dee-dad,” Niles writes from the distance of nearly sixty years' time. “So ungreat and, often, so in his cups, so malicious about these other men and their mannerisms and vanity and beliefs.”

Young Niles's principal means of escaping his father's disavowal of male friendship—and his oldest brother's resentment of any form of male camaraderie that excludes him—his through his extraordinary friendship with his schoolmate Giangiacomo Galliani, whom Niles affectionately calls Onni. He was “a too much admired and pawed and mauled and fondled child,” Niles writes. “I felt I knew why Onni liked me … By comparison to his family I was sensible.” Onni and Niles begin a different kind of education after the war, when Niles returns to Venice with his mother, whom he characterizes only glancingly. (Women play a distinctly marginal role in this world of shared, combative maleness.)

The education that Niles and Onni embark on is largely sentimental. Through Onni, Niles learns to embrace the life of the city. As adolescents, powerfully alive in that ancient place, they jointly explore their differences. They discuss and act out their political beliefs (during the war Onni was a Fascist), their nationalist sentiments (“‘The U.S.A. is rotten.’ ‘Your country is rotten.’ ‘No, I mean it’”), and their erotic preoccupations (Onni is the more overtly homosexual of the two). What Niles and Onni are particularly attuned to—and what forms the basis of this novel's “action”—is the various forms that communication can take, including the sexual. One scene describes a simulation of heterosexual intercourse that is at once tender and sad, hokey and sophisticated:

The moment's drama is a progression into sexuality of a realer sort than before. The feelings are larger. The progression is difficult with a guy, with this posture, but the ugliness is effectually sexual. …

Touch. Touch can be like words.

In this scene, which forms the emotional nexus of the book, Brodkey continues to push against the boundary between sex and language. He creates an entirely new fiction out of the ashes of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Unlike Aschenbach, the writer who, despite a passionate homosexual awakening at the end of his life, remains repressed, Niles pursues this complex love—“love such as it is, love in reality, moment by moment, as, in a way, we invent it as we go along”—and he is transformed by it. “I am not handsome,” Niles writes. “I am noticeable. I am someone partly created by Giangiacomo.” Niles's freedom is embodied in Brodkey's prose, which is always colloquial and surprising, syntactically offbeat. “Onni needed me. … I was consciously well-meaning and that lightened his sense of things.” It brings to mind the way bluejeaned Americans abroad may look to Europeans: looser in their gait, unmindful of the weight of history. And within this prose Niles and Onni glitter against Venice's backdrop of aged stone in all their complicated camaraderie.

Niles and Onni are rapacious when it comes to understanding each other, and it is this desire for an encyclopedic understanding—of sexuality, identity, politics, the idea of home—which is their true queerness. As in Brodkey's previous books, the real subject of this novel is intimacy, a nearly vanished sentiment in much of the American fiction being written just now. Like his characters, Brodkey is most obsessed with exploring the moment in which intimacy happens, and our subsequent greed for or avoidance of it. Onni and Niles grow up and separate, but their friendship, profane or otherwise, is the first haunting of their lives.