[In the following review, Curran considers Brodkey's unflinching and unsentimental exploration of his struggle with AIDS in This Wild Darkness.]

“Being ill like this combines shock—this time I will die—with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself. It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself. No one belongs entirely to nature, to time: identity was a game. … At times I cannot entirely believe I ever was alive, that I ever was another self, and wrote and loved or failed to love. I do not really understand this erasure. … But this inability to have an identity in the face of death—I don't believe I ever saw this written down in all the death scenes I have read or in all the descriptions of old age.” [This Wild Darkness] is how Harold Brodkey ends his narrative about his dying of AIDS. His death sentence does not bother him, because he has “had little trouble living with the death-warrant aspect of life until now.” Statements like these create a uniquely dark perspective in Brodkey's story. Facing the terminality of AIDS, he avoids sentimentality as well as conventional notions of heroism or moments of spiritual enlightenment.

My own response was to look for the sources of darkness in his story, for why there seemed to be so little light, so marginal an affirmation of life. “Death is a bore,” he tells us. “But life isn't very interesting either. I must say I expected death to glimmer with meaning, but it doesn't. It's just there.” Later he admits: “I find the silence of God to be very beautiful, even when the silence is directed at me. I like to be alone, me and the walls. I do what I do, I think what I think, and to hell with the rest of it, the rest of you; you don't actually exist for me anyway—you're all myths in my head.”

To some degree Brodkey charges off his “odd cowardice toward grief” to his having been traumatized as a child. That helped him put “a wall between him and pain and despair, between him and grief.” Futureless, he tells us that he had “no sense of gestating my death.” “Everything was suffocation and the sentence of death.” His wife Ellen and Barry, his doctor, serve as the banks of his “Mississippi” as his “fever moved in acid waves. Some sort of final castration, real helplessness, felt very close. I could see nothing to do about it. A display of manner, a touch of William Powell, of Huckleberry Finn with the bed as the raft, was like a broken piece of salvage to me.”

In part this darkness got its start in Brodkey's own near-death experiences with illness. He almost died himself when his mother passed away, leaving him an orphan at the age of two. He relates that his real mother died of a curse laid on her by her rabbi father. Her dying extended painfully over a period of months of peritonitis, a bungled abortion, or cancer, depending on whose story you believed. Afterward, Brodkey was abandoned by his father Max Weintrub, an illiterate local junk man and a semipro prizefighter. Weintrub sold him to the Brodkeys for three hundred dollars.

Later, for the most part of his childhood, his adoptive parents were ill with heart trouble and cancer. He listened to their raging and grieving as they burdened everyone around them with their dying. Clearly abusive, his childhood left him with the impression that from infancy on his life had always been “on the verge of being eaten alive.” People quarreled over him and threatened force, and there was violence directed at him. And he tells us that he thought of his childhood and adolescence “as sexual, as filled with the sexual intrusion of others.” Just part of his response to this was hating to be touched.

Furthermore, taking care of his adoptive father when he was twelve and thirteen entailed sexual assault every day for two years, twice a day, every morning and every evening. Joe's wife Doris, Brodkey's adoptive mother, simply told him to learn to keep his mouth shut about the situation which “helped keep both her and Dad alive: it interested them, this love thing.” But he was used to being manipulated by both adoptive parents, because he felt that “either of [them] would have killed the other for me. Sometimes they fought over me, and it seemed to be to the death.” Brodkey's attractiveness to high-school girls, coupled with his indifference to their youthful desire, led to the school's calling his parents to complain that his unresponsiveness had caused these teenage women emotional distress. “Whatever I was,” he observed, “it was not taken to be a private property and mine. I understood my father's actions on this level, in this light.”

Such information striates this memoir like an undetected infection, a psychic form of AIDS that Brodkey had lived with all his life. He had been invaded long ago by “organisms” against which he had no effective defense. My sense was that the depressing darkness of Brodkey's dying related far more to the painful details of his childhood and adolescence than he was inclined to admit.

Brodkey seems not to want to contaminate the portrait of his dying with explanations based on the details of his past. He takes death on without whining. But I kept feeling the tension between the often fragmented story of his personal life and the darkness of his narrative. Both seemed to petition for a more fully realized cause-and-effect interconnection in the narrative. Perhaps this tension was more a form of testimony to his having, as he said, put “a wall between him and pain and despair, between him and grief” than it was evidence of the influence of depression on point of view.