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The Runaway Soul
Acclaimed New Yorker writer Brodkey set the literary world ablaze with this much-talked-about debut novel--a literary tour de force about an adopted child in the early 1930s who is raised in the St. Louis household of his cousins. Impressive. . . . The work of a lifetime. . . . As haunted by love, death, and madness as The Oresteia.--Washington Post Book World.
835 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1991
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About the author
Harold Brodkey
76 books88 followersHarold Brodkey, born Aaron Roy Weintraub, was an American short-story writer and novelist.
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Displaying 1 - 20 of 20 reviews
March 10, 2013
Brodkey’s lifelong opus, largely forgotten for obvious reasons, is a contender for the most solipsistic, inward-looking 835pp novel since Bill Vollmann’s nine-volume Reflections on My Eyebrows. Brodkey, who published a story collection in 1958 and no books in the 60s or 70s or most-of-the-80s until Stories in an Almost Classical Mode in 1988, by remaining a New Yorker man his entire life, made himself a human dartboard by holding back this novel until 1991. Because TRS was savaged by everyone except forgotten novelist D.M. Thomas (famous for his pretentious erotica in the 80s). The novel is narrated by Brodkey stand-in Wiley and dwells largely on his adolescence in the Midwestern region and his monstrous and marvellous sister Nonie.
My position is that I simultaneously loathe and adore this novel, usually within the same sentence, and my assumption is that Brodkey knew his prose would meet with outright hostility, but forged ahead in his artistic vision to create a work replete with such a painstaking and psychopathically obsessive Proust-in-therapy micro-dissection of his childhood, no one could deny, nor appreciate, his particular brand of sectionable genius. The opening parts of TRS are the most arresting—the beautiful rhythms of the lightning storm scene with Nonie, and the writing on this character in general, are positively Gassian—but the prose falls into a strange discursive mode, stripped of musicality and liveliness, lapsing into dense thickets of dashes and ellipses and fragmented phrases, almost as if the narrator is speaking aloud to his snoozing therapist on the page. This becomes the default mode for TRS, and I spent over a month desperate to recapture the amazement of the first 200pp, but the amazement eluded me.
Simply, I agree with some of Brodkey’s nemeses who accused TRS of arrogance, pretentiousness, repetition and self-obsession. It drips from almost every page, but that doesn’t cancel out the moments of thunderous intelligence, the tantric eroticism (one sex scene lasts over 80pp and one canoodling scene 50pp), the fabulously vivid family descriptions, and the scenes with brattish babe Nonie, equal only to Cora in Janice Galloway’s All Made Up in the evil sister stakes. And the style, once tolerated, does contain moments of illumination and beauty beneath the babbling indulgence. As unsatisfying as it is on the whole, TRS does capture the particulars of (an) adolescence with a meticulous psychological insight and heavyhearted attention to detail. At times, it feels like writing this physically pains Brodkey, and that melancholy lifts up and weighs down his ill-fated opus.
HB discusses TRS in two parts with MS on Bookworm.
My position is that I simultaneously loathe and adore this novel, usually within the same sentence, and my assumption is that Brodkey knew his prose would meet with outright hostility, but forged ahead in his artistic vision to create a work replete with such a painstaking and psychopathically obsessive Proust-in-therapy micro-dissection of his childhood, no one could deny, nor appreciate, his particular brand of sectionable genius. The opening parts of TRS are the most arresting—the beautiful rhythms of the lightning storm scene with Nonie, and the writing on this character in general, are positively Gassian—but the prose falls into a strange discursive mode, stripped of musicality and liveliness, lapsing into dense thickets of dashes and ellipses and fragmented phrases, almost as if the narrator is speaking aloud to his snoozing therapist on the page. This becomes the default mode for TRS, and I spent over a month desperate to recapture the amazement of the first 200pp, but the amazement eluded me.
Simply, I agree with some of Brodkey’s nemeses who accused TRS of arrogance, pretentiousness, repetition and self-obsession. It drips from almost every page, but that doesn’t cancel out the moments of thunderous intelligence, the tantric eroticism (one sex scene lasts over 80pp and one canoodling scene 50pp), the fabulously vivid family descriptions, and the scenes with brattish babe Nonie, equal only to Cora in Janice Galloway’s All Made Up in the evil sister stakes. And the style, once tolerated, does contain moments of illumination and beauty beneath the babbling indulgence. As unsatisfying as it is on the whole, TRS does capture the particulars of (an) adolescence with a meticulous psychological insight and heavyhearted attention to detail. At times, it feels like writing this physically pains Brodkey, and that melancholy lifts up and weighs down his ill-fated opus.
HB discusses TRS in two parts with MS on Bookworm.
September 7, 2024
Honestly, I completely fail to see why everybody hated this novel upon release (and seemingly continues to hate it today). I found the writing was stunning, very lyrical, downright poetic in places. The deep-dives into the mechanisms and idiosyncrasies of memory and emotion were fascinating. The characters were engaging and funny and vivid, particularly the narrator's (adoptive) father, S.L., and his older (adoptive) sister, Nonie. I didn't even mind the extremely long sex scenes (although, to be fair, I LOVED Parallel Stories by Peter Nadas, a book also criticized for the length of its sex scenes, so I have a high threshold for that kind of thing). The pacing was somewhat languid, but I don't mind slow movement if the writing is compelling, which in this case it was.
I went into The Runaway Soul expecting to read one of the great failed novels, this of course based primarily on what the critics said about it back when it first came out (and, to a lesser extent, based upon the mixed things later reviewers had to say about it on websites such as this one). But what I actually got was something else entirely: a powerful, unique, beautifully written take on the "coming of age" story, full of sex, death, tragedy, humor, and deep psychological/emotional insight.
My verdict: unfairly overlooked/dismissed, but very much worth your time. Read it.
- - - - - -
UPON REREADING (July-August 2024)
What an incredible thing. There are many tremendous novels, but there is (and always will be) just one The Runaway Soul. It stands as a devastating indictment of short-sighted, uncomprehending, impatient, half-assed—perhaps even jealous—literary critics everywhere. I see it as an artistic achievement of monstrous proportions, and no amount of arguing will dissuade me. Its prose alone guarantees it a spot in my personal pantheon of great texts, not to mention the amazing cast of characters, the psychological incisiveness, the slow and careful pacing, etc. If this isn’t the proverbial “real thing,” I don’t know what is.
Twice is simply not enough. I’ll be reading this again and again until I am no more.
For now though, the second trek has been completed and I remain in total awe. I’ll end with the very fitting final lines:
“But, for a moment, let us pause. Let us be still. Or, rather, let me be quiet in her memory—and in memory of me—for a little while.”
Amen, Mr. Brodkey.
I went into The Runaway Soul expecting to read one of the great failed novels, this of course based primarily on what the critics said about it back when it first came out (and, to a lesser extent, based upon the mixed things later reviewers had to say about it on websites such as this one). But what I actually got was something else entirely: a powerful, unique, beautifully written take on the "coming of age" story, full of sex, death, tragedy, humor, and deep psychological/emotional insight.
My verdict: unfairly overlooked/dismissed, but very much worth your time. Read it.
- - - - - -
UPON REREADING (July-August 2024)
What an incredible thing. There are many tremendous novels, but there is (and always will be) just one The Runaway Soul. It stands as a devastating indictment of short-sighted, uncomprehending, impatient, half-assed—perhaps even jealous—literary critics everywhere. I see it as an artistic achievement of monstrous proportions, and no amount of arguing will dissuade me. Its prose alone guarantees it a spot in my personal pantheon of great texts, not to mention the amazing cast of characters, the psychological incisiveness, the slow and careful pacing, etc. If this isn’t the proverbial “real thing,” I don’t know what is.
Twice is simply not enough. I’ll be reading this again and again until I am no more.
For now though, the second trek has been completed and I remain in total awe. I’ll end with the very fitting final lines:
“But, for a moment, let us pause. Let us be still. Or, rather, let me be quiet in her memory—and in memory of me—for a little while.”
Amen, Mr. Brodkey.
December 2, 2020
Discussed this book here: https://youtu.be/Y2hQ1F36XU8
Read
August 5, 2018Well now. Another legendary masterpiece dropped off the map now already decades ago. Another FAT masterpiece 30-ish years in gestation. Another masterpiece you'll feel better off having not read. And peacefully you'll never need be in the position to know what you are knot=reading. Another literary genius Wunderkind knocked down to size by our Cultural Gatekeepers and other guilty parties.
Q :: So then but did you enjoy it?
A :: No, not particularly.
Q :: Then how can you be talking about 'masterpiece' and 'genius'? Were you being ironic?
A :: No. Not being ironic. Judgments about objects, such as novels, are not in the first place based upon my 'enjoyment' of them. My statements about enjoying/knot=enjoying a novel are judgements about my enjoyment ; statements of my attempt to evaluate an object such as a novel are judgements of that object and are made on a more or less adequate base of familiarity with that kind of thing. I don't dare make a judgement about the quality of a milkcow because despite having several dairymen in my family, I never bothered picking up the standards of judgement regarding milkcows. But I know the difference between a Stephen King and a Marcel Proust. And the difference is about more than just an ego=centric me.
Q :: There you go with the Proust thing again. Why does everyone have to invoke Proust (or Joyce) in every instance?
A :: Well I guess in the first instance it's because we are dealing with a novel that operates at that level. In my experience some novels feel like they attempt a project sort of in line with Proust and others, rather different kinds of novels, feel to be attempting something more in line with whatever Joyce was doing in his three great works. At any rate, I'm much more of a Joycean than a Proustian ; that's where the subjectivity and 'bias' come in. I'd rather read something Joycean/Wakean than something Proustian. I don't enjoy the Proustian stuff so much. But that doesn't mean I can't say things like 'genius' and 'masterpiece' about it. It's just that I'm more than happy to let others take on the interpretive/evaluative tasks. I'm not likely to read a book of essays on stuff like this ; but I'll pick up, say, Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction since James Joyce in a heartbeat.
Q :: So then you're saying that The Runaway Soul is 'Proustian'.
A :: More or less. Why? Well it's all that introversion, all the probing inwardness, all that psychology. Constant self-analysis swirling swirling around itself.
Q :: Memory?
A :: Well, yes, that too. It's also about itself being written in a way similar to Proust's book.
Q :: What other books should be maybe reconsidered in regard to our heretofore prejudicial knot=reading ; I mean, what other books should be on our horizon but are not on our horizon.
A :: Well, look. First let me just assuage you a little bit because I know maybe not you, Q, but probably someone overhearing this is going to launch into a liberal guilty hissy=fit. You mentioned 'horizon' which I think is the right word here. I've had this book on my horizon for I think like six years now. Not only on my horizon, but literally on my bookshelf. For six years I've anticipated reading it, was haunted by it, taunted by it. Downright feared reading it. Those six years of the book on my horizon are part of my reading experience. Which is to say, those six years of the book's presence upon my horizon made my reading of it much richer ; made the reading other books much richer. You might call it 'the art of not reading' ; but I prefer to think of it as "knot=reading". Put this novel on your horizon. Maybe you won't ever read it. But knowing of it, touching a copy perhaps, nodding toward it now and then, well, you're better for doing that.
Q :: I was sort of expecting a list of titles and such.....
A :: Right. There's Divine Days (for which of course you will first have read the trilogy) ; you already know Miss MacIntosh and W&M, they're legendary in certain circles (but still....) ; The Making of Americans will make you a better person if it's on your horizon haunting you ; The Disconnected ; a heck of a lot of stuff from SoAm that's not GGM ; there's Fado Alexandrino ; Bottom's Dream should be dreamt even if only to gawk ; the works of Paul Metcalf ; at any rate, you know the list will never end.
Q :: Indeed.
Recently Michael LaPointe wrote a piece on Brodkey ::
"Harold Brodkey: Yesterday's Genius".
https://brickmag.com/harold-brodkey-y...
Very required/recommended reading.
"Italo Calvino once argued that “literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement,” and Brodkey’s massive novel had failure programmed into its DNA."
"A selection of characteristic responses to The Runaway Soul: “formless, plotless and graceless” (London Review of Books); “logorrhea in excelsis” (Washington Post); “masturbatory narcissism” (New York Times)."
"We don’t really believe in genius anymore...."
"Such is the challenge of The Runaway Soul. Do we dare trust yesterday’s genius? We instinctively resist a consciousness, ungovernable as a river, that might bear us along, overwhelm, or even drown us."
At any rate, you know I'll be back for more.
___________
See Friend Jonathan's review:
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... Unfortunately Friend Jonathan bailed gr a while back. In lieu, see MJ's fair=minded Review
__________
The Village Bookshop had an inscribed 1st/1st for US$7.95. Now I have it. I am happified.
__________
I kn[e]w nothing. Something about "much maligned" and one insightful goodreads reviewer used the word "verbal diarrhea" but hers is a sentence fragment meaning perhaps to have said "not" verbal diarrhea.
"Whatever" say today's kids and we'll provide a link:
"Fading Fast: Once hailed as the American Proust, Harold Brodkey is All But Forgotten. Ten Years After His Death, is a Reassessment Due?" [yes] by Jonathan Baskin
http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_...
Q :: So then but did you enjoy it?
A :: No, not particularly.
Q :: Then how can you be talking about 'masterpiece' and 'genius'? Were you being ironic?
A :: No. Not being ironic. Judgments about objects, such as novels, are not in the first place based upon my 'enjoyment' of them. My statements about enjoying/knot=enjoying a novel are judgements about my enjoyment ; statements of my attempt to evaluate an object such as a novel are judgements of that object and are made on a more or less adequate base of familiarity with that kind of thing. I don't dare make a judgement about the quality of a milkcow because despite having several dairymen in my family, I never bothered picking up the standards of judgement regarding milkcows. But I know the difference between a Stephen King and a Marcel Proust. And the difference is about more than just an ego=centric me.
Q :: There you go with the Proust thing again. Why does everyone have to invoke Proust (or Joyce) in every instance?
A :: Well I guess in the first instance it's because we are dealing with a novel that operates at that level. In my experience some novels feel like they attempt a project sort of in line with Proust and others, rather different kinds of novels, feel to be attempting something more in line with whatever Joyce was doing in his three great works. At any rate, I'm much more of a Joycean than a Proustian ; that's where the subjectivity and 'bias' come in. I'd rather read something Joycean/Wakean than something Proustian. I don't enjoy the Proustian stuff so much. But that doesn't mean I can't say things like 'genius' and 'masterpiece' about it. It's just that I'm more than happy to let others take on the interpretive/evaluative tasks. I'm not likely to read a book of essays on stuff like this ; but I'll pick up, say, Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction since James Joyce in a heartbeat.
Q :: So then you're saying that The Runaway Soul is 'Proustian'.
A :: More or less. Why? Well it's all that introversion, all the probing inwardness, all that psychology. Constant self-analysis swirling swirling around itself.
Q :: Memory?
A :: Well, yes, that too. It's also about itself being written in a way similar to Proust's book.
Q :: What other books should be maybe reconsidered in regard to our heretofore prejudicial knot=reading ; I mean, what other books should be on our horizon but are not on our horizon.
A :: Well, look. First let me just assuage you a little bit because I know maybe not you, Q, but probably someone overhearing this is going to launch into a liberal guilty hissy=fit. You mentioned 'horizon' which I think is the right word here. I've had this book on my horizon for I think like six years now. Not only on my horizon, but literally on my bookshelf. For six years I've anticipated reading it, was haunted by it, taunted by it. Downright feared reading it. Those six years of the book on my horizon are part of my reading experience. Which is to say, those six years of the book's presence upon my horizon made my reading of it much richer ; made the reading other books much richer. You might call it 'the art of not reading' ; but I prefer to think of it as "knot=reading". Put this novel on your horizon. Maybe you won't ever read it. But knowing of it, touching a copy perhaps, nodding toward it now and then, well, you're better for doing that.
Q :: I was sort of expecting a list of titles and such.....
A :: Right. There's Divine Days (for which of course you will first have read the trilogy) ; you already know Miss MacIntosh and W&M, they're legendary in certain circles (but still....) ; The Making of Americans will make you a better person if it's on your horizon haunting you ; The Disconnected ; a heck of a lot of stuff from SoAm that's not GGM ; there's Fado Alexandrino ; Bottom's Dream should be dreamt even if only to gawk ; the works of Paul Metcalf ; at any rate, you know the list will never end.
Q :: Indeed.
Recently Michael LaPointe wrote a piece on Brodkey ::
"Harold Brodkey: Yesterday's Genius".
https://brickmag.com/harold-brodkey-y...
Very required/recommended reading.
"Italo Calvino once argued that “literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement,” and Brodkey’s massive novel had failure programmed into its DNA."
"A selection of characteristic responses to The Runaway Soul: “formless, plotless and graceless” (London Review of Books); “logorrhea in excelsis” (Washington Post); “masturbatory narcissism” (New York Times)."
"We don’t really believe in genius anymore...."
"Such is the challenge of The Runaway Soul. Do we dare trust yesterday’s genius? We instinctively resist a consciousness, ungovernable as a river, that might bear us along, overwhelm, or even drown us."
At any rate, you know I'll be back for more.
___________
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
__________
The Village Bookshop had an inscribed 1st/1st for US$7.95. Now I have it. I am happified.
__________
I kn[e]w nothing. Something about "much maligned" and one insightful goodreads reviewer used the word "verbal diarrhea" but hers is a sentence fragment meaning perhaps to have said "not" verbal diarrhea.
"Whatever" say today's kids and we'll provide a link:
"Fading Fast: Once hailed as the American Proust, Harold Brodkey is All But Forgotten. Ten Years After His Death, is a Reassessment Due?" [yes] by Jonathan Baskin
http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_...
June 4, 2019
"The runaway soul goes groping--and plunging--and flying and lying--and trying---and dying..." Yes it does.
"...the mind wanders among puzzles; minds wander: it is what minds do." Also, true. Especially in the case of this (anti-)novel, almost as if it were specifically designed to make the reader's mind wander, or levitate between the (semi-)abstract prose and unrelated thoughts spurred (or not) by portions of the text itself, although there aren't any puzzles here, mostly absences. The Runaway Soul seems to be a peak (though not zenith) of Proustian evolution that reaches something of a mental singularity (in the technological sense), thus leaving the reader behind. In this way the novel could be regarded as a nadir. But there are moments that evoked for me unnamable feelings and an actual skull-mental tingle similar to THC or maybe ASMR, and a couple more concrete than that, such as my father's hairbrush stubble against my adolescent cheek. Accidental symptoms of a failed masterpiece?
Brodkey repeatedly mentions the failure of conventional narrative forms and exercises to describe or relay reality, as with this bit of seeming sincerity: "What happened is hard to describe: nothing in life, especially voices and motives and actions, is as clear as it is in a narrative." If this is true, I am still not convinced that Brodkey has come up with a solution in this, his first and last novel. One should look to the works of Joseph McElroy for a better approximation of a solution. One of the most notable differences here is that, with McElroy, I am left puzzled in the sense of mental mystification, like a Lynch film, really. Whereas with The Runaway Soul I am left puzzled in the sense of slightly irritated confusion. In other words, there was plenty of potential, but it was circumnavigated and -scribed and ultimately abandoned. Such as Nonie's psychopathy, which most likely caused her to kill her infant brother, then her second infant brother. Or the barest of hints that S.L. molested his adopted son, Wiley (a notion that was indirectly confirmed in the life of the author).
And so we are left with something of an 835-page excursus, composed almost entirely of exposition sans concrete examples, scenes, and actions, which makes the exposition seem mostly meaningless and emotionless ('The War' chapter is the height of such inexplicable babble). Would it help to read Brodkey's earlier work, which is ostensibly a constant reshuffling of the same themes and characters, etc.? See here: https://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb...
All this might have been redeemed by a more evocative prose style, but it tends to be, on the whole, bland and repetitive, if not at times suspect of amateurism (if one didn't know better), such as the unselfconscious indulgence of adverbs: "...it is present phallically and cuntedly, present in actuality, not symbolically only." "fuckworthily" "...ex-Lutheranly and middle-classishly-during-the-war." It reads laughably uglily.
Salman Rushdie admired Brodkey's creation of portmanteaus. I don't think sticking a hyphen between words (where an 'and' could suffice) really counts. Which isn't to say that these hyphenated words in The Runaway Soul (a tic I often see in southern fiction) are not evocative at times, although rarely.
What I'm left with is disappointment, because the opening to the novel is as amazing as it is promising. Maybe that's the real reason Michael Silverblatt spent the first week or so re-reading the beginning and only the beginning of his copy of The Runaway Soul. Perhaps Silverblatt has a tinge of prophecy in his tendencies, as with the demonic babble and lightning-phobic shrieking of Nonie during a thunderstorm, heralding her death by fire in womanhood.
I'll leave you with a rare example of when the prose style tends to work: "The acerbic smoke, the cold tile, the faintly slide-y bathroom rug mean that I am here--in this order of factuality--and I pause, in the shadows: I am thin-bodied still, not as thin as at birth or when I was fourteen, but thin: the line of connection is recognizably present for me of some of my outward selves in other moments, ones that have occurred; and the longing--the anger at longing and the passionate wish not to long for things but to have them and to be at rest, ashore, asleep, in love, not in love, whatever--is a longing for an absolute, the single absolute thing, the sentence, the one statement, the word, the syllable, the breath of intention to speak in which the novel, this one, and the moments, and their reality, are encapsulated, are held as purely--well, as sensibly--as a seed in a cotyledon or as a baby in a womb or as my eye in its socket or as, supposedly, I am, in various theologies, held in the eye and mind of God."
P.S. Looking up 'cotyledon', I'm fairly sure that the anatomically correct phrase should be "as a cotyledon in a seed..." Can any botanist or horticulturist weigh in on this?
"...the mind wanders among puzzles; minds wander: it is what minds do." Also, true. Especially in the case of this (anti-)novel, almost as if it were specifically designed to make the reader's mind wander, or levitate between the (semi-)abstract prose and unrelated thoughts spurred (or not) by portions of the text itself, although there aren't any puzzles here, mostly absences. The Runaway Soul seems to be a peak (though not zenith) of Proustian evolution that reaches something of a mental singularity (in the technological sense), thus leaving the reader behind. In this way the novel could be regarded as a nadir. But there are moments that evoked for me unnamable feelings and an actual skull-mental tingle similar to THC or maybe ASMR, and a couple more concrete than that, such as my father's hairbrush stubble against my adolescent cheek. Accidental symptoms of a failed masterpiece?
Brodkey repeatedly mentions the failure of conventional narrative forms and exercises to describe or relay reality, as with this bit of seeming sincerity: "What happened is hard to describe: nothing in life, especially voices and motives and actions, is as clear as it is in a narrative." If this is true, I am still not convinced that Brodkey has come up with a solution in this, his first and last novel. One should look to the works of Joseph McElroy for a better approximation of a solution. One of the most notable differences here is that, with McElroy, I am left puzzled in the sense of mental mystification, like a Lynch film, really. Whereas with The Runaway Soul I am left puzzled in the sense of slightly irritated confusion. In other words, there was plenty of potential, but it was circumnavigated and -scribed and ultimately abandoned. Such as Nonie's psychopathy, which most likely caused her to kill her infant brother, then her second infant brother. Or the barest of hints that S.L. molested his adopted son, Wiley (a notion that was indirectly confirmed in the life of the author).
And so we are left with something of an 835-page excursus, composed almost entirely of exposition sans concrete examples, scenes, and actions, which makes the exposition seem mostly meaningless and emotionless ('The War' chapter is the height of such inexplicable babble). Would it help to read Brodkey's earlier work, which is ostensibly a constant reshuffling of the same themes and characters, etc.? See here: https://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb...
All this might have been redeemed by a more evocative prose style, but it tends to be, on the whole, bland and repetitive, if not at times suspect of amateurism (if one didn't know better), such as the unselfconscious indulgence of adverbs: "...it is present phallically and cuntedly, present in actuality, not symbolically only." "fuckworthily" "...ex-Lutheranly and middle-classishly-during-the-war." It reads laughably uglily.
Salman Rushdie admired Brodkey's creation of portmanteaus. I don't think sticking a hyphen between words (where an 'and' could suffice) really counts. Which isn't to say that these hyphenated words in The Runaway Soul (a tic I often see in southern fiction) are not evocative at times, although rarely.
What I'm left with is disappointment, because the opening to the novel is as amazing as it is promising. Maybe that's the real reason Michael Silverblatt spent the first week or so re-reading the beginning and only the beginning of his copy of The Runaway Soul. Perhaps Silverblatt has a tinge of prophecy in his tendencies, as with the demonic babble and lightning-phobic shrieking of Nonie during a thunderstorm, heralding her death by fire in womanhood.
I'll leave you with a rare example of when the prose style tends to work: "The acerbic smoke, the cold tile, the faintly slide-y bathroom rug mean that I am here--in this order of factuality--and I pause, in the shadows: I am thin-bodied still, not as thin as at birth or when I was fourteen, but thin: the line of connection is recognizably present for me of some of my outward selves in other moments, ones that have occurred; and the longing--the anger at longing and the passionate wish not to long for things but to have them and to be at rest, ashore, asleep, in love, not in love, whatever--is a longing for an absolute, the single absolute thing, the sentence, the one statement, the word, the syllable, the breath of intention to speak in which the novel, this one, and the moments, and their reality, are encapsulated, are held as purely--well, as sensibly--as a seed in a cotyledon or as a baby in a womb or as my eye in its socket or as, supposedly, I am, in various theologies, held in the eye and mind of God."
P.S. Looking up 'cotyledon', I'm fairly sure that the anatomically correct phrase should be "as a cotyledon in a seed..." Can any botanist or horticulturist weigh in on this?
July 16, 2024
A coming of age story with an emphasis on coming.
“Stories In An Almost Classical Mode” was the best collection of stories I’ve ever read, but was hesitant and almost fearful of this book after reading about this book.
I’m happy to say for no one trying to read this, I’m glad I went ahead and encountered Brodkey’s proprietary “moments” again.
I did not at all encounter anything similar from the previously mentioned story collection outside of a few names.
If he’s the American Proust, he’s more correctly termed the “White Trash” Proust. As a fellow “Middle Western” raised child, this is a badge of achievement. Of survival.
This is a book of remembrance of his life being adopted by the worst family imaginable. In just under 900 pages, we encounter much nuanced loving and touching from almost literally every character Wiley was in proximity to.
Like “Classical Mode” I started with excitement, rolled my eyes and scoffed at some of the cringy narrations like “fucky-ducky”, but by the halfway point, Brodkey has you submerged fully in his consciousness and it’s kind of a beautiful and ugly thing I feel like I haven’t experience anywhere else.
Here are some prose samples I’ve texted some friends:
“It's sad inside me.. the willfulness and the intensity of feeling.
If I looked in the mirror at this point, I might think, I don't want to be shallow but I don't want to feel this much either ... I suddenly imagine my own face here a sharp dark-whitish blur of emblematic and compromised presence. Not real. I am very still. Oh, the tight-balled grief.
I have a rictus-smile. On my palely sweating face. I'm ashamed of my dad's death. I feel shame that death exists. I feel amazingly lost and wrong-muscularly and electrically jangled. This grief-I am adopted.
It burns, the thing of being awake and real: it burns. Daddy sometimes said when I was in pain about something, JESUS GOD, LOOK AT YOU; and I would blush and try to be deadpan.
The blaze of supreme heat behind my eyes: juiceless and hot, ironic, lunatic—the lostness-one's flammable breathing edged hoarsely with upset at absence, loss—a noticeable sound: one knows oneself this way from before... Peekaboo, Bad Times; whoop-de-doo...
The fear of the wild world, this partly obliterated world (by grief, the continuums of grief, of griefs of all kinds) I am cheatingly ashen and sweet, tense-nerved, stinking—and secret. I don't like the force there is in grief. I stare blindly in the weirdly lit lightlessness, the whitening real moment. One piece of pinkish light is on the window screen. I smile wryly. The tastes I had that year were foul and rough—tender and sincere—childish and hidden but wartime-fashionable, all in all. I don't know about others but I want to be able to be a brave soldier. I compare my reserves of strength and my state now. I oppose the anguish, if that is what it is, to my morning strength and my chances of living through the day and lasting to tomorrow. I don't really know about tomorrow or if I'll make it until then and be sane, I don't even know about the next few minutes, but I'm not going mad in this grief just now.
This pet is over and I’m safe for a while.” (Failed to have the page, but is near the end of the chapter titled “The Masturbation”)
And
“So, our lips come together in the mutual oddity of something like being retarded or having regressed. They touch, a lile moistly, chapped.
We pause without parting from each other: we listen at our lips to each others stuff in the caves of our mouths. I think I hear a buzz of parts of her mind-like schoolchildren — or like the self decomposed in a tomb
-the smell of death is here. I am oddly phallically well instructed in my own requirements, although specifically a fool as a Casanova that way. My feelings are an odd pressure, like a muscular pressure, or clench-ing, and yet some quality in the feeling, like an edge (as if the feeling were a butterfly wing or a moth wing of a man-moth), rots the surfaces of the lips and into the rot her rot pours and oozes until my eyelids fly open and I look into her eyes and she is there... I don't know who she is but this is an uncontingent end of loneliness-oddly sportive— and yet a fatality. It is like bleeding to death, but that is not what is happening. How odd the world is. I know her. How odd. How odd. How odd. I hold my mouth rottingly to hers and bleed to death emotionally into a ghoulishly after-everything-is-over sense of intimacy. But nothing is over. I intensely mind intimacy—and I wrap myself in it. It scares me. Revenant creatures walk then: the dead. Love and its griefs-you know that shit? The skulls, with the hair and features, of the two deadishly living kids are like lanterns half buried where some sort of breath of wind blows them in such a way that—if I may say this—it is as if the burning stuff inside each skull-sexual hallucination, sexual calculation, sexual wit, sexual selfishness, sexual stupidity, whatever —moves weirdly, dirtily, effectually, from skull to skull and burns each soul up in the magnetisms that arise from such motions.” (697 I believe)
Brodkey is a lot and I cannot lie, but this is the only man I would trust to write about paint drying and it being done to the highest order.
There was nothing wrong with Silverbladt reading the first page over and over again. What people fail to understand and that Silverbladt did was, “this is a book I’m going to read for the rest of my life.”
My brain is fried and fuck Nonie (not actually for the love of everything.)
I don’t know. The book is under $10. Doesn’t hurt to have it look back at you.
Brodkey is everything under the iceberg. The closet you’re unable to get out of.
“Stories In An Almost Classical Mode” was the best collection of stories I’ve ever read, but was hesitant and almost fearful of this book after reading about this book.
I’m happy to say for no one trying to read this, I’m glad I went ahead and encountered Brodkey’s proprietary “moments” again.
I did not at all encounter anything similar from the previously mentioned story collection outside of a few names.
If he’s the American Proust, he’s more correctly termed the “White Trash” Proust. As a fellow “Middle Western” raised child, this is a badge of achievement. Of survival.
This is a book of remembrance of his life being adopted by the worst family imaginable. In just under 900 pages, we encounter much nuanced loving and touching from almost literally every character Wiley was in proximity to.
Like “Classical Mode” I started with excitement, rolled my eyes and scoffed at some of the cringy narrations like “fucky-ducky”, but by the halfway point, Brodkey has you submerged fully in his consciousness and it’s kind of a beautiful and ugly thing I feel like I haven’t experience anywhere else.
Here are some prose samples I’ve texted some friends:
“It's sad inside me.. the willfulness and the intensity of feeling.
If I looked in the mirror at this point, I might think, I don't want to be shallow but I don't want to feel this much either ... I suddenly imagine my own face here a sharp dark-whitish blur of emblematic and compromised presence. Not real. I am very still. Oh, the tight-balled grief.
I have a rictus-smile. On my palely sweating face. I'm ashamed of my dad's death. I feel shame that death exists. I feel amazingly lost and wrong-muscularly and electrically jangled. This grief-I am adopted.
It burns, the thing of being awake and real: it burns. Daddy sometimes said when I was in pain about something, JESUS GOD, LOOK AT YOU; and I would blush and try to be deadpan.
The blaze of supreme heat behind my eyes: juiceless and hot, ironic, lunatic—the lostness-one's flammable breathing edged hoarsely with upset at absence, loss—a noticeable sound: one knows oneself this way from before... Peekaboo, Bad Times; whoop-de-doo...
The fear of the wild world, this partly obliterated world (by grief, the continuums of grief, of griefs of all kinds) I am cheatingly ashen and sweet, tense-nerved, stinking—and secret. I don't like the force there is in grief. I stare blindly in the weirdly lit lightlessness, the whitening real moment. One piece of pinkish light is on the window screen. I smile wryly. The tastes I had that year were foul and rough—tender and sincere—childish and hidden but wartime-fashionable, all in all. I don't know about others but I want to be able to be a brave soldier. I compare my reserves of strength and my state now. I oppose the anguish, if that is what it is, to my morning strength and my chances of living through the day and lasting to tomorrow. I don't really know about tomorrow or if I'll make it until then and be sane, I don't even know about the next few minutes, but I'm not going mad in this grief just now.
This pet is over and I’m safe for a while.” (Failed to have the page, but is near the end of the chapter titled “The Masturbation”)
And
“So, our lips come together in the mutual oddity of something like being retarded or having regressed. They touch, a lile moistly, chapped.
We pause without parting from each other: we listen at our lips to each others stuff in the caves of our mouths. I think I hear a buzz of parts of her mind-like schoolchildren — or like the self decomposed in a tomb
-the smell of death is here. I am oddly phallically well instructed in my own requirements, although specifically a fool as a Casanova that way. My feelings are an odd pressure, like a muscular pressure, or clench-ing, and yet some quality in the feeling, like an edge (as if the feeling were a butterfly wing or a moth wing of a man-moth), rots the surfaces of the lips and into the rot her rot pours and oozes until my eyelids fly open and I look into her eyes and she is there... I don't know who she is but this is an uncontingent end of loneliness-oddly sportive— and yet a fatality. It is like bleeding to death, but that is not what is happening. How odd the world is. I know her. How odd. How odd. How odd. I hold my mouth rottingly to hers and bleed to death emotionally into a ghoulishly after-everything-is-over sense of intimacy. But nothing is over. I intensely mind intimacy—and I wrap myself in it. It scares me. Revenant creatures walk then: the dead. Love and its griefs-you know that shit? The skulls, with the hair and features, of the two deadishly living kids are like lanterns half buried where some sort of breath of wind blows them in such a way that—if I may say this—it is as if the burning stuff inside each skull-sexual hallucination, sexual calculation, sexual wit, sexual selfishness, sexual stupidity, whatever —moves weirdly, dirtily, effectually, from skull to skull and burns each soul up in the magnetisms that arise from such motions.” (697 I believe)
Brodkey is a lot and I cannot lie, but this is the only man I would trust to write about paint drying and it being done to the highest order.
There was nothing wrong with Silverbladt reading the first page over and over again. What people fail to understand and that Silverbladt did was, “this is a book I’m going to read for the rest of my life.”
My brain is fried and fuck Nonie (not actually for the love of everything.)
I don’t know. The book is under $10. Doesn’t hurt to have it look back at you.
Brodkey is everything under the iceberg. The closet you’re unable to get out of.
January 17, 2021
Finally getting around to Brodkey’s “masterpiece” and while it doesn’t register for me as such I am glad to finally have read. Absolute props to him for pouring everything into this. I know it took years to write and it shows. All over the place at times and a good portion I just wanted to end earlier. I commend him for putting it all in. I’d rather read an 800+ book where the author puts his/her heart and soul into something rather than a multitude of average 200+ page books. So much promise. So glad I read it. Should you? Yes! Definitely. Not everything is Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow or Moby Dick. Search this out. Read and tell us what you think.
November 4, 2022
Kan je dit werk lezen, zonder te denken aan zijn ontstaangeschiedenis? Meer dan dertig jaar schreef Brodkey aan dit boek en werd, nadat het dan eindelijk was op de markt verscheen, volledig afgekraakt door de literaire pers. Ik las het boek voor een aankomend essay over Brodkey.
Laat ik gelijk met de deur in huis vallen: ik vind The Runaway Soul niet de momumentale flop, zoals het vaak wordt omschreven. Het is veel te lang, egocentrisch, arrogant, bij vlagen onbegrijpelijk en mist soms scherpe redactie, dat wel. Maar ik las vooral een boek van een man die in de kern worstelt met zijn verleden; die wees is, en zich afvraagt wat dit voor zijn leven betekent; die in een geweldadig gezin is opgegroeid en door niemand op waarde werd geschat. Het ontbreekt Brodkey aan liefde, voor zijn personages, voor zichzelf.
De ambities die hij had voor deze roman waren zo hoog, het moest eigenlijk wel floppen. Niettemin geloof ik dat er een bijzonder verhaal in dit boek schuilt, dat er genoeg over dit boek en deze auteur te zeggen valt, maar je moet het wel durven lezen.
Laat ik gelijk met de deur in huis vallen: ik vind The Runaway Soul niet de momumentale flop, zoals het vaak wordt omschreven. Het is veel te lang, egocentrisch, arrogant, bij vlagen onbegrijpelijk en mist soms scherpe redactie, dat wel. Maar ik las vooral een boek van een man die in de kern worstelt met zijn verleden; die wees is, en zich afvraagt wat dit voor zijn leven betekent; die in een geweldadig gezin is opgegroeid en door niemand op waarde werd geschat. Het ontbreekt Brodkey aan liefde, voor zijn personages, voor zichzelf.
De ambities die hij had voor deze roman waren zo hoog, het moest eigenlijk wel floppen. Niettemin geloof ik dat er een bijzonder verhaal in dit boek schuilt, dat er genoeg over dit boek en deze auteur te zeggen valt, maar je moet het wel durven lezen.
June 16, 2019
I give up. This is verbal diarrhea. Annoying, because, for a few moments, Brodkey is really brilliant.
February 9, 2025
3. The Runaway Soul by Harold Brodkey.
This is the longest, thickest and meatiest book I’ve had in years. I think Brodkey would want to know that.
It’s the story-non-story-anti-story of Wiley Silenowicz’s early life, various parts of it, filtered through Wiley, various parts of him. Well, mostly just two parts. The brain and the other brain.
Physical, mental, sensual and intellectual experiences smashed through the strainer of memory, ground through the mill of writing it down, then relived and digested again. It’s Wiley’s ouroboros of self. It is visceral and horny and sad and very, very male. It’s a 100 page sex scene that is barely about sex. It’s an introspection on family, connections and cruelty. It’s a confession and a boast.
If I’d read my own review before I read this book, I wouldn’t have read this book. But I’m glad I did, because through it all, it is *good.* Brodkey’s got some absolutely laughable dialogue, and I nearly threw chairs when four-year-old genius Wiley *taught himself to read*…*in half an hour*, but there is also some absolutely stunning prose here, and the end result is a family that will never leave my brain. 4/5 but I may rate higher after I’ve come down from it. #2025books
This is the longest, thickest and meatiest book I’ve had in years. I think Brodkey would want to know that.
It’s the story-non-story-anti-story of Wiley Silenowicz’s early life, various parts of it, filtered through Wiley, various parts of him. Well, mostly just two parts. The brain and the other brain.
Physical, mental, sensual and intellectual experiences smashed through the strainer of memory, ground through the mill of writing it down, then relived and digested again. It’s Wiley’s ouroboros of self. It is visceral and horny and sad and very, very male. It’s a 100 page sex scene that is barely about sex. It’s an introspection on family, connections and cruelty. It’s a confession and a boast.
If I’d read my own review before I read this book, I wouldn’t have read this book. But I’m glad I did, because through it all, it is *good.* Brodkey’s got some absolutely laughable dialogue, and I nearly threw chairs when four-year-old genius Wiley *taught himself to read*…*in half an hour*, but there is also some absolutely stunning prose here, and the end result is a family that will never leave my brain. 4/5 but I may rate higher after I’ve come down from it. #2025books
April 1, 2025
A novel that creates a strict internal logic that’s used to carry a narrative forward based on what it excludes (regardless of how inventive or unique the language is, or how much variance there appears to be in other ways on the surface via deployment of language) experiences unique challenges. One example of this where it’s pulled off masterfully would be Samuel Beckett’s trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable). The strict internal logic of this trilogy would be something along these lines: Restrict language to its sparest forms. Reduce plot to almost non-existence, unable to move forward. Have an anti-protagonist. Have the subject matter restricted to internal thoughts that don’t often reflect anything in the material world. Etc. The conceit itself greatly restricts the form, but working within that, Beckett achieves his prose’s crowning achievement.
The Runaway Soul also sets great restrictions on a world that, paradoxically, is often rendered with extravagant (and inconsistently well thought out) prose. Of course, Brodkey’s world is different. The restrictive construct: Do not dwell on settings. We don’t need to know where they are. Every paragraph dissects a feeling in minute detail and is self-reflective to the intentional point of narcissism. Every sentence is a mirror into some deep, fateful insight that may be reversed in the next sentence. In The Runaway Soul , the adult (one Wiley Silenowicz) looks back on his youth and reduces it to the self-absorbed feelings of new love, family love, family hate. The world of the child by extension is more important than the world of the adult. Repressed sexual experience and feeling, more important than anything. The entire book is taken up with family conflict (which is itself often highly sexually charged—SL and his son, Wiley [the Narcissus of the book, and presumably a Brodkey stand-in of sorts] have an uncomfortably intimate encounter or two; Wiley’s sister Nonie appears to abuse Wiley physically in sexual and non-sexual ways); Wiley in his encounter with Remsen at the end of the book spends 10 pages having them talk about masturbating in front of each other, whether they should touch each other’s penises, whether their penises should touch each other’s, etc; 40 pages of kisses with one of his sister’s female friends are rendered as if each kiss and grope is a battlefield, sex and relationship conflict and the tension of drawing nearer then further apart (never have so many pages been devoted to agonized and basically unconsummated sexual encounters, a full 350 pages of the 800+ page length is “the agony of failed sex”).
Oh, sure, there’s other stuff in here (Wiley’s class consciousness seems right on point—the emotional trauma of being part of a failed upper class family, a family with some connections, is rendered in broad strokes; his sister Nonie is a truly dejected monster but not as detestable as some think she is, and Brodkey is careful to show the internal conflict Wiley has concerning the following opposites: (a) Nonie is a monster, and (b) Nonie is a woman worthy of sympathy, accursed through being put on the earth with her own narcissistic and difficult personality, etc.
Most telling of Brodkey’s limitations is that the scenes (the book is 12 or 13 scenes rather than something with a plot; there are parts that could have been rearranged and I’m not sure it would have mattered) become more undisciplined as the book goes on. The encounter with Remsen seems as if he hadn’t really finished revising the section. Of course, after 23 years of waiting perhaps everyone was pressuring him to finally make the book available and complete it.
It would be remiss to neglect sharing some of the insights that Brodkey’s Wiley has in the later pages of this book, as Brodkey labors to tie the narrative shards together. Deep in a sea of confounding prose, he comes up with the following: “One grows from having merely human curators in childhood to having outright enemies in one’s adult life, and they prevent certain actions, they propose limits to one’s will—one’s rewards—they want a cut of whatever we have…” And that, in a sense, is an excellent telling of what Brodkey has been showing us throughout the book. Wiley’s parents were limited by their poor health; his sister by her antisocial personality; him by his indecision, his vacillations, his confused idea of what being a “man” is, and so forth. But the question is whether the insight is earned by the lengthy conversations that trail off into nothingness (how often can the parents say the same thing to Wiley about how he should deal with his complicated sister? How often can Wiley and Remsen argue about socialism without saying anything meaningful and intelligent about it? Etc… are we reading a book about limited, confused people, or is it a limited, confused book?)
Another interesting one, from a little earlier, when Wiley reminisces about his dad holding him: “I don’t want the world to be essentially different—[it would be] a stupid thing to wish for, who would ever be smart enough to know what such a world should be.” Brodkey here seems, however, to be undermining some project he’s undertaking—why undertake such a colossally complicated narrative over the minutiae of daily life in the absence of a desire to change the world? Still, the 2 insights are themselves things that strike me as being very true.
Yet, Brodkey’s restriction of his content to childhood and over-emphasis on sex separates this book from the broad class consciousness and societal vivisection that Proust achieved (and it surely seems that Proust is a huge influence on this work, regardless of all the blurbs on the book from when it came out saying it was Brodkey’s own “genius”). Other writers have also done the whole “sex for hundreds of pages in a literary work” better also.
In the end, I wanted to like this. I thought Brodkey really went for it here, with his considerable talents (he is a quite excellent writer in terms of innovative shifts in tone, on the sentence level, etc). In the end, sadly, The Runaway Soul doesn’t amount to much. But I did finish it, which it seems is more than many can say from my reading about the work, the conditions of its release, and how it was received.
The Runaway Soul also sets great restrictions on a world that, paradoxically, is often rendered with extravagant (and inconsistently well thought out) prose. Of course, Brodkey’s world is different. The restrictive construct: Do not dwell on settings. We don’t need to know where they are. Every paragraph dissects a feeling in minute detail and is self-reflective to the intentional point of narcissism. Every sentence is a mirror into some deep, fateful insight that may be reversed in the next sentence. In The Runaway Soul , the adult (one Wiley Silenowicz) looks back on his youth and reduces it to the self-absorbed feelings of new love, family love, family hate. The world of the child by extension is more important than the world of the adult. Repressed sexual experience and feeling, more important than anything. The entire book is taken up with family conflict (which is itself often highly sexually charged—SL and his son, Wiley [the Narcissus of the book, and presumably a Brodkey stand-in of sorts] have an uncomfortably intimate encounter or two; Wiley’s sister Nonie appears to abuse Wiley physically in sexual and non-sexual ways); Wiley in his encounter with Remsen at the end of the book spends 10 pages having them talk about masturbating in front of each other, whether they should touch each other’s penises, whether their penises should touch each other’s, etc; 40 pages of kisses with one of his sister’s female friends are rendered as if each kiss and grope is a battlefield, sex and relationship conflict and the tension of drawing nearer then further apart (never have so many pages been devoted to agonized and basically unconsummated sexual encounters, a full 350 pages of the 800+ page length is “the agony of failed sex”).
Oh, sure, there’s other stuff in here (Wiley’s class consciousness seems right on point—the emotional trauma of being part of a failed upper class family, a family with some connections, is rendered in broad strokes; his sister Nonie is a truly dejected monster but not as detestable as some think she is, and Brodkey is careful to show the internal conflict Wiley has concerning the following opposites: (a) Nonie is a monster, and (b) Nonie is a woman worthy of sympathy, accursed through being put on the earth with her own narcissistic and difficult personality, etc.
Most telling of Brodkey’s limitations is that the scenes (the book is 12 or 13 scenes rather than something with a plot; there are parts that could have been rearranged and I’m not sure it would have mattered) become more undisciplined as the book goes on. The encounter with Remsen seems as if he hadn’t really finished revising the section. Of course, after 23 years of waiting perhaps everyone was pressuring him to finally make the book available and complete it.
It would be remiss to neglect sharing some of the insights that Brodkey’s Wiley has in the later pages of this book, as Brodkey labors to tie the narrative shards together. Deep in a sea of confounding prose, he comes up with the following: “One grows from having merely human curators in childhood to having outright enemies in one’s adult life, and they prevent certain actions, they propose limits to one’s will—one’s rewards—they want a cut of whatever we have…” And that, in a sense, is an excellent telling of what Brodkey has been showing us throughout the book. Wiley’s parents were limited by their poor health; his sister by her antisocial personality; him by his indecision, his vacillations, his confused idea of what being a “man” is, and so forth. But the question is whether the insight is earned by the lengthy conversations that trail off into nothingness (how often can the parents say the same thing to Wiley about how he should deal with his complicated sister? How often can Wiley and Remsen argue about socialism without saying anything meaningful and intelligent about it? Etc… are we reading a book about limited, confused people, or is it a limited, confused book?)
Another interesting one, from a little earlier, when Wiley reminisces about his dad holding him: “I don’t want the world to be essentially different—[it would be] a stupid thing to wish for, who would ever be smart enough to know what such a world should be.” Brodkey here seems, however, to be undermining some project he’s undertaking—why undertake such a colossally complicated narrative over the minutiae of daily life in the absence of a desire to change the world? Still, the 2 insights are themselves things that strike me as being very true.
Yet, Brodkey’s restriction of his content to childhood and over-emphasis on sex separates this book from the broad class consciousness and societal vivisection that Proust achieved (and it surely seems that Proust is a huge influence on this work, regardless of all the blurbs on the book from when it came out saying it was Brodkey’s own “genius”). Other writers have also done the whole “sex for hundreds of pages in a literary work” better also.
In the end, I wanted to like this. I thought Brodkey really went for it here, with his considerable talents (he is a quite excellent writer in terms of innovative shifts in tone, on the sentence level, etc). In the end, sadly, The Runaway Soul doesn’t amount to much. But I did finish it, which it seems is more than many can say from my reading about the work, the conditions of its release, and how it was received.
April 11, 2019
Flusso di coscienza. Brodkey ti guida nella sua mente e in modo esauriente descrive il suo Io. Magistrale la traduzione di Flavio Santi. Eroico
October 24, 2023
An audacious behemoth, a veritable leviathan of a work, certainly a book you could never recommend to anyone, doing so would be like off-loading a puppy or a plant or a reptile or a disabled child to someone, you’re palming off an incredible time sink, an excursion up to Everest in a seemingly innocuous 835 pages. You have to schedule this book in, you’re an analyst sitting down with a pipe in your mouth listening to this man bloviate about his entire history, mapping it out in excruciating detail, as you unwittingly become ingrained into his syntax, into his laws, in fact merging and moving towards an almost complete absorption by him, sinking into his panoramic contemplations, subsumed by this alien consciousness which takes page after page to become synchronised with - up until the metamorphosis culminates and all of a sudden becomes complete.
Brodkey has achieved something marvellous by being able to maintain such a precarious state of vertigo for this many pages, the edifice of his life standing like a mountain range laying for miles around, insuperable. The Runaway Soul is a book of dizziness, of arcane and archaic speech, of minute facial gestures and tautly examined motives. It is infantile, pretentious, and wholly autistic, but it is a magnificent achievement, as taxing as all taxonomies must be - by necessity.
There is a glib sentiment I’ve heard proffered in many different places, and attributed to (at least according to my hasty google search), of all people, Stephenie Meyer (that genius of prose). It’s the platitude that we live many lives by reading many books, that we achieve some kind of transcendence via a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the lives of others by the act of reading itself. The issue is that these lives, in a great deal of novels and fiction you will read at least, are hastily conjured-up, regurgitated, and essentially artificial fabrication of real lives - they can be beautiful, you can be charmed by them, you can even be disgusted by them, and if the writer is of a high enough calibre you may even be so incredulous (or perhaps generous enough) to call their portrayals realistic, making the huge gambit that they in some way manage to shore up to the infinite complexity of a single lived moment. But surely the intensity of a single life, displayed in its harrowing minutiae and triviality, trumps such shallowness? Brodkey’s book seems to pole vault across this hurdle, this giant obstacle concerning the sheer complexity of character and biography, and allows you to be consumed, thrown as you are into its quixotic quotidian reflection of mid century Midwestern existence - his answer is a howling yes, an affirmation of the achingly singular and particular, a great globule of phlegm in the face of the idea of easily-digestible 'characters'.
Brodkey’s prose is in a sense incomprehensible, his references and dialect and mental associations are nigh on inaccessible to a reader from the modern day. An alterior mind chugs and churns before you, in all of its failures and manifest (and exhibited with masochistic pleasure at every opportunity, mind you) maladaptions, in all of its interrupted flows, in its pain and paltry pleasures. Brodkey’s individuality and experience comes to the fore with a searing effect of reality - a light too bright to be looked at, an intelligence both boundless and tedious that must be contended with (that is, if you have the sheer stamina to follow his densely-thicketed trains of thought).
I mean, do you want to talk about one of the great auteurs of the 20th century? My God. I don’t know if I loved it, but I stand before it amazed, it is an exercise of architectonics applied to the puzzle of fiction, an infinite labyrinthine jungle gym of a confessional. Don’t read it, it’s that good. I don’t know if I truly understood it all, maybe that by itself is of some minor significance, and maybe it is a positive that I didn’t. It spurns me to write and to speak of it in glowing terms, and to gush over it when speaking to friends, so that's probably a good sign that I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if I'm a little too close to this ordeal to say that I cherished it or would ever wish it on another. Taken as a whole, it’s too much - but then again, maybe it’s just enough.
(It’s funny to note that I never found an album to listen to in conjunction with this book, something that rarely ever happens. Brodkey is his own idiosyncratic composition, and no amount of John Fahey or Toumani Diabaté was able to change that fact. Oh yeah, and I’ve been reading this since fucking January/February (I’m writing this in October) - the eight month slog that this tome took out of me should hopefully be indicative of its brutally solipsistic density. Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick are a drop in Runaway Soul's ocean when it comes to the dedication and discipline required to get to its last page. Good luck!!)
Brodkey has achieved something marvellous by being able to maintain such a precarious state of vertigo for this many pages, the edifice of his life standing like a mountain range laying for miles around, insuperable. The Runaway Soul is a book of dizziness, of arcane and archaic speech, of minute facial gestures and tautly examined motives. It is infantile, pretentious, and wholly autistic, but it is a magnificent achievement, as taxing as all taxonomies must be - by necessity.
There is a glib sentiment I’ve heard proffered in many different places, and attributed to (at least according to my hasty google search), of all people, Stephenie Meyer (that genius of prose). It’s the platitude that we live many lives by reading many books, that we achieve some kind of transcendence via a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the lives of others by the act of reading itself. The issue is that these lives, in a great deal of novels and fiction you will read at least, are hastily conjured-up, regurgitated, and essentially artificial fabrication of real lives - they can be beautiful, you can be charmed by them, you can even be disgusted by them, and if the writer is of a high enough calibre you may even be so incredulous (or perhaps generous enough) to call their portrayals realistic, making the huge gambit that they in some way manage to shore up to the infinite complexity of a single lived moment. But surely the intensity of a single life, displayed in its harrowing minutiae and triviality, trumps such shallowness? Brodkey’s book seems to pole vault across this hurdle, this giant obstacle concerning the sheer complexity of character and biography, and allows you to be consumed, thrown as you are into its quixotic quotidian reflection of mid century Midwestern existence - his answer is a howling yes, an affirmation of the achingly singular and particular, a great globule of phlegm in the face of the idea of easily-digestible 'characters'.
Brodkey’s prose is in a sense incomprehensible, his references and dialect and mental associations are nigh on inaccessible to a reader from the modern day. An alterior mind chugs and churns before you, in all of its failures and manifest (and exhibited with masochistic pleasure at every opportunity, mind you) maladaptions, in all of its interrupted flows, in its pain and paltry pleasures. Brodkey’s individuality and experience comes to the fore with a searing effect of reality - a light too bright to be looked at, an intelligence both boundless and tedious that must be contended with (that is, if you have the sheer stamina to follow his densely-thicketed trains of thought).
I mean, do you want to talk about one of the great auteurs of the 20th century? My God. I don’t know if I loved it, but I stand before it amazed, it is an exercise of architectonics applied to the puzzle of fiction, an infinite labyrinthine jungle gym of a confessional. Don’t read it, it’s that good. I don’t know if I truly understood it all, maybe that by itself is of some minor significance, and maybe it is a positive that I didn’t. It spurns me to write and to speak of it in glowing terms, and to gush over it when speaking to friends, so that's probably a good sign that I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if I'm a little too close to this ordeal to say that I cherished it or would ever wish it on another. Taken as a whole, it’s too much - but then again, maybe it’s just enough.
(It’s funny to note that I never found an album to listen to in conjunction with this book, something that rarely ever happens. Brodkey is his own idiosyncratic composition, and no amount of John Fahey or Toumani Diabaté was able to change that fact. Oh yeah, and I’ve been reading this since fucking January/February (I’m writing this in October) - the eight month slog that this tome took out of me should hopefully be indicative of its brutally solipsistic density. Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick are a drop in Runaway Soul's ocean when it comes to the dedication and discipline required to get to its last page. Good luck!!)
tasted
December 22, 2022The big question with this novel, which has been taking up a lot of shelf space for over 30 years, is how someone so clearly brilliant can sound so stupid. There are many reasons. One is that much of Brodkey's stream of consciousness is a teenager’s stream. Streams are by nature stupid in their rawness, and those of a teenager can be especially dumb. But can’t the reader merely skim past what doesn’t appeal? The problem is that there is some beautiful writing, and even occasional thoughts, that the reader might miss. Oh well.
A second reason is that, unlike Thomas Wolfe, Brodkey’s writing doesn’t seem to have experienced an editor’s hand. But editing this would be a Herculean task, much harder than a reader’s skimming.
When the protagonist’s sister is the focus, and occasionally elsewhere, the prose is more controlled. And dull. Dullness is what surprised me most about this novel. It's what did me in.
A second reason is that, unlike Thomas Wolfe, Brodkey’s writing doesn’t seem to have experienced an editor’s hand. But editing this would be a Herculean task, much harder than a reader’s skimming.
When the protagonist’s sister is the focus, and occasionally elsewhere, the prose is more controlled. And dull. Dullness is what surprised me most about this novel. It's what did me in.
February 2, 2013
Flying and crying and trying and dying and wondrous entrance into Wiley Silenowicz's consciousness, St. Louis representing realness of the twentieth century, indirect hommage to both hobos and Proust the famous homo in the first couple vignettes, a book that lit up my late-teen years to the possibilities of modernist and postmodernist fiction.
October 16, 2022
I remember very little about this book other than that it was a highly anticipated novel by a famous writer which was universally derided and despised by all involved. I read this a year or so after it came out and was suitably unimpressed.
Want to read
November 2, 2007I tried to read it (I will continue to try) but there was just too much Writing in there to hold my attention.
February 23, 2008
Verbal diarrhea. Read anything else by him.
January 10, 2021
I'll get back to it. Seems like my sort of thing
April 25, 2017
I knew in advance that Brodkey's novel is an exploration of burgeoning consciousness a la Joyce; what surprised me is how Proustian it feels, in its dilations of small moments, and how Nabokovian, in its self-referential language. A sampling, all in the voice of the protagonist, Wiley Silenowicz:
"time exists with such entirety that what the conscious mind mostly does is calculate-and-remember in regard to the future" ( 115)
"The multiplicity of voices in a book and then the enormous multiplicities of voices in different books, a lot of books, different sorts of books--those voices in me are not bound together into a chorus of doctrine" (455)
"It takes an incredible amount of courage to live even if you lie about it a lot, to yourself, to others" (561)
"I am hurt and I feel a lifetime of starvation ahead of me. But I am glad to be here. In a way" (718)
"time exists with such entirety that what the conscious mind mostly does is calculate-and-remember in regard to the future" ( 115)
"The multiplicity of voices in a book and then the enormous multiplicities of voices in different books, a lot of books, different sorts of books--those voices in me are not bound together into a chorus of doctrine" (455)
"It takes an incredible amount of courage to live even if you lie about it a lot, to yourself, to others" (561)
"I am hurt and I feel a lifetime of starvation ahead of me. But I am glad to be here. In a way" (718)
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