[In the following review, Binding offers a mixed assessment of The Runaway Soul.]

The great contemporary American psychologist, James Hillman, sees soul as “the poetic basis of mind” that converts “events into experiences” and stands in intimate and perpetual relation to death. “The soul is not unconscious … The psyche is constantly making intelligible statements.”

Such thinking surely permeates Brodkey's long, ambitious, questing novel. With indomitable energy, it attempts to find how events, whether “true” or not, are translated into experiences that will influence the soul's dialogue with the world. Hillman also opposes “soul” to “spirit”: spirit insisting on unity, soul being nurtured by diversity. This idea informs the novel. Spirit leads to totalitarianism; attention to the needs of soul to the pluralism necessary for sane living. For all its ruthless concern with the individual predicament, The Runaway Soul is ultimately a passionate plea for pluralism; for polytheism as a means of society's deliverance.

Wiley Silenowicz, born in 1930, is adopted when two years old by S L and Lila Silenowicz, a Jewish couple in St Louis. In 1944, S L dies, leaving Wiley, whom he has loved and yet insulted, doubly fatherless, at once precociously certain and vulnerably uncertain. S L and Lila have a child of their own, Nonie. The battle betwen Nonie and Wiley is at the book's centre, and it would be easy to oversimplify it. Wylie craves knowledge, truth; Nonie the satisfactions of fantasy, the imposition on herself and others of personas, designs, myths. But we have to remember that it is Wiley who is our principal informant.

Nonie can be seen as unconquerable territory for Wiley. The young man whose soul-culture must grow through sexuality, above all through relations with women, is forced to find his female sibling perpetually other. Her tragic death—through burning—is also a conflagration of hopes and fears in his own soul. There are limits to anyone's power over others, and the end of Nonie demonstrates this irreducibility. Only its acknowledgement can carry Wiley forward.

The novel's preoccupations inevitably lead to a break-up of chronology. Plumbing the psyche means returning again and again to key emotional situations, sometimes advancing forward, sometimes moving further backwards. Wiley makes the decisions here—and in his method, we can see one of Brodkey's mentors: the Sterne of Tristram Shandy, about to embark on plain narrative but held up by an associative reflection.

We are intended to think of Sterne, of course. Wiley, like his creator, is an intellectual, and no search for selfhood can now be conducted without awareness of predecessors. In the same way, possibly numinous moments bring us to another English soul-autobiographer, Wordsworth. When Wiley, in a wonderfully rich and dense passage, fools around with a boat in the river, hoping to come to terms with S L's death, we think of the boy Wordsworth and his shadow-stalked boat in The Prelude. But Wordsworth tries for absolutism; Brodkey is a passionate relativist.

The frontiers of self are most powerfully realised in sexual relations. In the many pages that take us into the country of blood and skin, actual occurrences are less important than needs and inclinations. His courageous exploration of the complexity of a single sexual impulse means that Brodkey opposes the totalitarianism of labelling, let alone judging, genitally directed activity.

Three sections are entitled “Homosexuality”; ironically, since we do not find there what convention would have us expect. What we do find is a teasing-out of currents, possibilities, reactions quite unlike anything I have read before. Young Wiley's journey on the Carolina-bound train with his cousin Daniel—who, in one sense of the term, desires him—has the many-layered quality of one's own experiences.

Daniel, of all the characters, is the one who feels most keenly the religious-cultural obligations of being Jewish. On that train he tells Wiley: “I will be a door to proper Jewish instruction for you.” But the door is all he can ever be. At the time of this offer, Jews are being murdered all over Europe. Nazism and anti-Semitism haunt the book, and in part dictate it. But Judaism is the original monotheism. Wiley says to Daniel:

I believe in God but not in a God that can be talked about. I can't imagine an omnipotent God who would bother with gender or speech—even as amusement … I can imagine a final, single truth, but not as a knowable frame for here. I think it's cheap and wrong and really dangerous to pull that single-notion stuff down into the stuff that goes on with us. It's what you move toward in your mind and in a moment, and you can talk about it; but not seriously—you can't ever use that stuff as a public premise without condoning murder.

This passage can illustrate the strength and some of the difficulties of The Runaway Soul. It is passionately serious, palpably convinced of the validity, indeed necessity of its own existence. For all that denial above of God's part in speech, one can feel assaulted by Brodkey's battle with words to the point of imaginative exhaustion. The reader's visual and aural needs are starved or frustrated at such times. Yet this may say more about our reading habits than about Brodkey, who expects participation in his own wrestlings.

The Runaway Soul brings us to the very limits of the reviewer's task. It would be cowardly to end on this note, however. One takes away from the novel not only its existential battles, but its sense of many worlds rotating, the worlds of its reverentially perceived people, saluting which is the final act of sanity and maturity. This sense makes the reader want to return to Brodkey's novel and know it better.