Volume 38, Number 19 · November 21, 1991
A Good Minestrone
By Robert M. Adams
The Runaway Soul
by Harold Brodkey
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 835 pp., $30.00
Harold Brodkey's big book The Runaway Soul appears before us trailing a long prepublication history, many high commendations, and a counterfoil of questioning if not derogatory comments. Associated and overlapping materials have already been published in two collections of short stories (First Love and Other Sorrows, 1958, and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, 1989). There has also been an extraordinary amount of gossip and opinionated talk about the author's career, much of it provoked by Brodkey's own personality, some of it inspired by the special reach of his literary ambition, even more of it centering on the prolonged and apparently turbulent process of editorial consideration and reconsideration, which has now resulted in a first, but monumental, novel by an author entering his sixties.
Review, 3762 words
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