[In the following review, Sage submits a favorable assessment of Profane Friendship.]

That he has set this tale in Venice makes Harold Brodkey seem more “placeable” in all sorts of ways. His first novel, Runaway Soul—so long-gestated, so notorious in advance, so aggressively take-it-as-brilliant or leave it—suffered horribly (some thought wonderfully) from his transparent determination to wrestle himself inwardly into the role of the Great American writer. This time he is taking a step back, putting it in a certain perspective—“it” being the same old ambition, what else, this is his subject—but here his exacerbated and jealous anxiety of influence acquires an appropriate world. For Venice is a commonplace of twentieth-century fiction, an imaginative meeting-point and a market of images, where you brush shoulders with James and Mann, Calvino and Coover, Spark and McEwan. And, although Brodkey has not become intertextually relaxed, or indeed user-friendly, exactly, when he writes like this, he is in company:

This half-abandoned circus of a city, this dead city, my Venice in its lovely fields of wetly-clanging sunlit water, such a ferocity of decoration and appetite for happiness …

Or again,

Two things I know about Venice. Nowhere in the city does the eye rest on a human claim to omnipotence and divine right. The jumble of cul de sacs and sudden unfoldings … don't suppose a single kingly eye …

No. Here is an abrupt commercial canniness mixed with daydreaming and an unbelievable depth of having trafficked in daydreams commercially for centuries. That is the other thing I know about Venice.

One of the things the Brodkey who was obsessed with originality couldn't allow himself was the lightness writing has when it can levitate on other people's breath. Not that he's quoting—but there's a patina, to do with our memories of the other books and the movies.

The plot, simplicity itself in a sense, is about a life-long but intermittent love-affair set in the watery, reflecting, theatrical city, between an American, Niles O'Hara, and a Venetian, Giangiacomo Gallieni—the first the son of a popular novelist, who, self-exiled in Venice in the 1930s, modelled himself enviously but hopelessly on Hemingway and John O'Hara; the second “a Fascist's beautiful-and-athletic little son … awfully interested in games of cruelty and peril … heroic matters. We all were … in those last prewar moments.” From this arrogant beginning, Giangiacomo, known throughout as Onni, turns into the very epitome of his native city's decadent charm. During the latter stages of the war, his mother sends him out to whore for her, and he never looks back after that, but becomes a model of promiscuity, cleverness and invention—a real challenge to his American chum, who comes back in their post-war adolescence, as a gangling “puritan-Utopian”, worried about whether he's homosexual, and still with just as much of a crush.

This is the core of the narrative, where we are back in Runaway Soul territory: “I am haunted and drawn to a sense of meaning that it seems to me can be found in sexual sensations … the ways the self changes in surges and spurts or by slow or fast subsiding.” The male-orgasmic imagery signals immersion in a kind of psychohistory of separation, the agony of (impossible) autonomy. Onni and Nino make love to each other in every way but the obvious one: through girls, mutual masturbation (or nearly), through talk and threats and jokes and shared hash and mutual violence. The climax, in the writing at least (and what else is all this for?), comes in an extraordinary passage, which is a kind of stoned bridal: “Time and the light drag like a white fabric placed over my head.” Drag is the word, and our “I” reacts like an outraged, virginal First Person, with violence and rejection. Onni, however, is at home in this feminizing, objectifying light:

he is photogenic. He is easy in his relation to light because he has less distortion of the self when he is stretched by internal pressures of nerves than I do …

(Probably to get the force of this passage you have to know that it follows on thoughts about the smallness of Onni's penis, and his capacity for multiple erections and orgasms, again mythically feminine.) It's in the mode of wild, stoned rejection of his love/envy for Onni that Nino spells out one of the book's other allegories—“Ford and Edison and Chaplin made Death and it has spread into your eternal life. … Those aren't footsteps you hear in Venice, that's the clatter of skeletons.” This in response to Onni's teasing—he's now a Communist, attacks America and the Bomb—but also as a part of a Europe-America dialogue involving James, Hemingway, even Nabokov.

In the book's last, 1990s, section we're “Old in Venice”. Onni is a hugely famous star, a legend of the screen, “I” am a writer—“but Time is where one truly lives anyway, a city is where one's self is moored for a time”. Onni wants a script with which to immortalize himself, Niles is still at the old game of competition for immortality, but almost (now) absolved, ready to be generous to Onni as the rival artist who lived in others' eyes without shame, was anybody's, like his whore of a city: “One might say he worked without contempt for the medium or for the audience, or even for the camera and the light. … Such a low submissive mastery.” In these last pages the aphoristic and (despite the message) monologic tendencies of the true Brodkey are to the fore: “years later, a woman I knew said I had closed the mirrors in order to become a writer. I don't know. Perhaps.” No way, I'd have said: he writes looking in the mirror, but at least now it's murkier, with others peering over his shoulder. And Onni, never “I” on his own account, is none the less “other” enough to let a kind of world in with him. Those who gave up on Runaway Soul should catch this one.