[In the following review, Davis criticizes what he preceives as pretension, posturing, and lack of coherence in The Runaway Soul.]

Harold Brodkey's unreadable magnum opus [The Runaway Soul], a great disservice to literature, consists of 835 remorselessly difficult pages, 600 words to the page, and is so literally weighty that it is best read in bed supported by a pillow. Brodkey has told interviewers that he worked on the novel for 27 years, an average production rate of less than three pages a month. His caterpillar pace has done strange things to the text and its effect on readers. Some scenes make us feel as if we were watching a tennis match in slow motion replay, with 10 seconds for every exchange at net, 15 for every serve.

Brodkey did prepare us for this in some of his short stories, for instance in “Innocence,” a 34-page tale that appeared originally in the New Yorker and was reprinted in his 1988 collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. (Two earlier collections came out in 1958 and '85.) Most of his short fiction has been published by the New Yorker, which admires him vastly and while he has on occasion worked editorially.

The last 20 pages of “Innocence” are devoted to telling how in 1951 or '52 a Harvard student, Wiley Silenowicz, produced orgasm in a Radcliffe student named Orra Perkins. Orra is terrific, even by Harvard standards. On first meeting her, people often involuntarily lifted their arms as if about to fend off the brightness of the apparition. … “To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die.”

The first night she slept with Wiley, Orra did not come. “She said she had never come with anyone at any time. She said it did not matter.” What happens in the next 20 pages changes her mind. Few words are uttered; mostly there are cries and groans and finally shouts of ecstasy.

At the beginning of the 11th chapter of The Runaway Soul we encounter Wiley and Orra (now “Ora”), still in bed, or rather in bed again. It is New York in 1956, and Wiley has some reputation as a writer. “At this time my life felt dreamed to me, dreamed by others as well as by me, while being clearly, achingly, brightly real.” They have been living together for four years.

“Tonight,” Wiley tells us, “Ora wept in her sleep. I was awake and lying beside her, nude, reading a book I didn't like.” Ora's leg was “resting like a drugged boa constrictor without scales or menace on top of mine.” It takes 10 pages for Ora to wake up. Wiley reads her sleeping mind. “I can hear her soundlessly bumping into the thoughts that she is furnished inwardly with about sexuality and us. … My own sexuality is crudded up some or hidden or is defended in a labyrinth or by a combination lock; and hers unlocks it; or creates steps for it to emerge, sweet-stinking monster thing, semi-ancient, sloppy, whatever.”

Forty pages of verbal and sexual intercourse follow. Every motion, every spoken phrase has an undermeaning that requires explanations—subtle, ingenious, metaphoric, inconclusive. Wiley's terms for physical sex, by contrast, are brutally one-syllabled.

Two chapters intervene—why, it is not clear—to carry us back to Wiley, aged six, listening to the rambling talk of the two principal women in his life—Lila, his adoptive mother, and her daughter Nonie, several years older than he. Their talk, accusatory and denying, has to do with dangerous assaults Nonie may have carried out on neighborhood girls.

Before Wiley was adopted, Lila gave birth to two infants who died early under mysterious circumstances. Jealous little Nonie may have had something to do with the deaths, a theme or suspicion that recurs throughout the novel. Like Brodkey's own writing, Silenowicz family life is full of assertions and denials, embraces and rejections, patterrdess and inconclusive.

Abruptly we are back in New York with Ora and Wiley that same evening in 1956, and told—a typical Brodkey whimsy—that only 10 minutes have elapsed since last we saw them. The scene for the next 90 pages is the bedroom, with occasional trips to the bathroom. “The toilet paper was a strange commentary on the Torah—not blasphemous.” For variety (Ora's idea) they try making love on the window ledge. The conversation now is more discursive, more novelistic, though Wiley quite inexcusably tells us in detail how Ora will die at 58, by suicide after refusing treatment for pancreatic cancer. She regretted the suicide pills when it was too late, and “yelled until she died. … SHE KILLED HERSELF NOISILY.” At the end Ora is asleep. “Her breath has the sound of a dry leaf on a marble floor.” Now it is Wiley who is crying.

In between are pages and pages of direct sex. The amount of sex in the novel is hard to exaggerate. I know of no serious writer who goes so far, not Joyce, not Mailer, not Henry Miller. An early chapter called “Masturbation” is about what it punningly says it is, “a lad and his lamp” and the magic power he can release so easily. Brodkey gives this common experience the works, for it contains in germ the sex of all the rest of the book. “Masturbation is a plenum of hallucination,” aging author sedately writes. “Whoooahhhhhh-eeeee … KAZOW, KAZOWIE,” the boy cries out. The landscape of Wiley's penis becomes as familiar as that of Cape Cod.

In the second half of the novel, Brodkey introduces six chapters (162 pages) on homosexuality, including Wiley's frequent but usually unsought experience of it. Still nearer the novel's conclusion, and totally out of place after all we have been through, is a chapter describing Wiley's original initiation into mutual sex. The seducer is a “vaguely wolfish twenty-years girl” named Leonie. Wiley is six feet two and a quarter inches tall, 14 years old, and weighs 142 pounds. His older sister Nonie drifts in and out, commenting sardonically. At one point she joins the fun by draping naked Wiley in her scarf and putting lipstick on him.

Names mean a lot to Brodkey. Leonie rhymes with Nonie. Nonie's real name, Norah, rhymes with Ora (“aura”?). When Wiley seeks out his birthplace and the lesbian who lived carnally with his biological mother, an oldish woman asks, “Are you Aaron Weintraub?” From Who's Who we learn that this was Brodkey's real name before he was adopted. All Brodkey's dates in Who's Who match Wiley's. Brodkey was born in 1930, adopted in 1932. He married Joanna Brown in June 1952, the month they received their ABs from Harvard and Radcliffe. They divorced 10 years later, after having a girl child whom the novel ignores. Brodkey as novelist is more comfortable with deaths, painful or prolonged deaths—those of his adoptive parents for instance—than with births.

Murderous Nonie is the real heroine of the novel. Wiley can no more separate his identity from hers than Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights could keep her identity from merging with Heathcliff's. Nonie ultimately burns to death while drunk. Suicide is common among those Wiley knows. So is aberrant sex. His adoptive father, addressing him with partly Yiddish baby talk, is always trying to get Wiley to kiss him on the mouth. Ora's father wanted her to go to bed with him in return for paying her Radcliffe fees. Brodkey keeps telling us that his characters are all liars, and even when not lying to others are self-deceived. How true this is of the narrator we naturally cannot tell.

Nevertheless, Brodkey's characters impress others. Or so he says. Relatives of Wiley's adoptive parents have huge amounts of money. Nonie had great success working for the Air Corps in World War II. Her face appeared on recruiting posters and she had a street at an air base named for her. Ora's father said “his father had been about to be appointed Secretary of State when he quarreled with John Hay and with Mark Hanna.”

From childhood Wiley is called a genius. At Harvard “I was in style, sort of male target of the month—sort of,” and later, “an awful lot of people were in love with me that year.” When he and Ora walk into a crowded room at Harvard, people fall silent.

Brodkey has been compared to Proust. Indeed, Proust figures in the novel when Ora, weeping, reads his “stuff on jealousy and love.” He “writes well,” she says, “He's deep.” But Proust was influenced by Henri Bergson and John Ruskin, he was an admirer of George Sand, and he was an ardent activist in the Dreyfus case. Brodkey's career contains no equivalents. Socially and politically he is as hard to pin down as Norman Mailer has come to be. He uses “American” and “Fascist” in quirky ways. His Jews are Jews chiefly by not being Jews. Institutions hardly exist for him, or their histories. Though Brodkey went to Harvard for four years and lived in Adams House, Wiley refers only slantingly one of his favorite words) to college social events. Of classrooms, professors, books read he says not a word.

Of course, the New Yorker is not completely wrong about Brodkey. In a good mood he can create Turneresque landscapes, can coin aphorisms that would have delighted Auden, can celebrate the “greased-slimed wonder of sexual intercourse” in the religio-erotic language of a 16th-century mystic. But mostly he creates things only to destroy them, states ideas only to deny them. His conspicuous gifts are used wantonly and with obsessive repetition. We have to listen to the father's total vocabulary of nicknames and Yiddishisms, and Lila's total repertoire of cliches and folk sayings.

A typical paragraph can be a single sentence of 40 lines, punctuated with dashes, enlivened by italics and boldface, but containing all that Brodkey thought of while writing it, until it has no coherent meaning at all. This its throwaway ending usually admits. Amid the posturing and obfuscation we encounter pearls on nearly every page, but since, in a novel that lacks pattern and progression, they often have no connection with what precedes and follows them, there is no way of finding them except by reading every puzzling word, every frustrating sentence on The Runaway Soul's 800-plus pages. That is too much to ask of anyone.