![]() Though not quite a contemporary of Bellow and Mailer, he is old enough to have served his literary apprenticeship at a time when talk of the Great American Novel was still fashionable. Brodkey is not a Post-Modernist, and he has evidently learnt nothing from recent European and Latin American novelists. Few of those lulled by the publicity into buying this book are likely to get that far.Īs entertainment The Runaway Soul is a non-starter, but as a supposedly major contribution to mainstream American fiction it is conclusive evidence of the decadence of the form. It is not even clear why the novel ends where it does, since ‘let us pause’ is all the narrator says in the middle of his last paragraph. Harold Brodkey, who began his career in the New Yorker in the Fifties, has been slowly maturing not a well-tempered masterpiece but the garrulous, profligate self-celebrations of a precocious adolescent who never grew up. ![]() A sort of Midwestern version of Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’, its 800 pages of first-person narrative are formless, plotless and graceless. Sadly, The Runaway Soul is only the most overweight first novel of all time. ‘On the evidence of two collections of short stories, he has been compared to Proust, Wordsworth and Milton.’ After more than twenty-five years’ labour, he has finally published ‘the most eagerly awaited first novel of all time’. ‘This man has been called America’s greatest writer,’ boasts Cape’s press release.
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