[In the following review, French offers a laudatory assessment of The Abundant Dreamer.]

Harold Brodkey has an extraordinary, almost subterranean, reputation among a small group of readers and critics in the United States. This seems strange at first because, though Brodkey must now be in his fifties, his reputation is based on a virtual handful of short stories as well as the rumours about a novel that Brodkey has been working on for many years.

Furthermore, the subject matter of this, Brodkey's second collection of stories [The Abundant Dreamer], is the standard fare of modern American short fiction, especially that which appears in the New Yorker: the love affairs and family relationships of wealthy, East Coast, highly educated, often Jewish people.

Also, like his fellow New Yorker contributor, John Updike, Brodkey is little interested in matters of form. There is no writing about writing here, no preoccupation about the artificiality of the fictional form. In an old-fashioned way, Brodkey is using his literary tools to explore reality.

It all seems very traditional but it is Brodkey's very ordinariness that makes these stories so startling. “His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft” consists of nothing but a man's childhood memories of his father. Brodkey's triumph is to use an adult's perception to recapture just what a father seems like to a small boy, the size, the smell, the feel.

Freud used to write that his psychological discoveries had been anticipated by the great artists. Brodkey has taken up this implicit challenge thrown down to writers and he explores the relations between his characters like a scientist of the emotions.

He is extraordinarily perceptive about complex states of mind which he can describe without resolving. “On the Waves”, for example, consists of nothing but a single conversation in a gondola between an American tourist and his seven-year-old daughter in which every meanand impulse seems misunderstood.

The book's title story, “The Abundant Dreamer”, is a technical tour de force, as a film director on location in Rome plans set-ups while recalling his relationship with his grandmother who has just died. Quite unobtrusively, it becomes a meditation on the imagination. But Brodkey rarely discusses ideas of this kind explicitly. It is significant that the one occasion on which this occurs is in a 30-page story that consists of almost nothing but explicit sexual description. The first-person narrator of “Innocence” writes: “I distrust summaries, any kind of gliding through time, any too great a claim that one is in control of what one recounts; I think someone who claims to understand but who is obviously calm, someone who claims to write with emotion recollected in tranquillity, is a fool and a liar. To understand is to tremble. To recollect is to re-enter and be riven.”

To talk of Brodkey as a scientist is not to imply cold detachment. Brodkey might argue that no one believes any more that scientists can separate themselves from what they study. Brodkey's narrators, including on occasion himself, cannot tell stories dispassionately because they cannot step outside the lives of which their story is a part.

Brodkey has all the attention to surface detail of the best short story writers. But he also forces readers to ask troubling questions about what we do when we make stories out of our lives. This is a masterly collection that deserves to find an audience in Britain.