Books: Atavistic Gondolas

STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE

by Harold Brodkey

Knopf; 596 pages; $24.95

Over the decades, Harold Brodkey has become the darling of what might be called the Grecian Urn School of literary critics (“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter”). Brodkey’s enormous reputation does not stem from his first book, a collection of nine short stories published back in 1957, but from a novel, Party of Animals, that he famously refuses to finish. To be sure, Brodkey’s short fiction has occasionally appeared in magazines over the intervening decades. But it is his lonely struggle to produce a big book that has impressed some pretty influential folks. Yale professor Harold Bloom calls Brodkey “unparalleled in American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner.” Susan Sontag says Brodkey is “going for real stakes. I read every word he writes.” The author, who lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, has sometimes been willing to join the chorus of his admirers: “It’s dangerous to be as good a writer as I.”

Under these circumstances, publishing anything might seem an unacceptable risk. Why encumber a reputation with evidence? Nevertheless, here comes Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, which collects 18 pieces that have appeared over the past 25 years, many of them in The New Yorker. The book’s arrival has been accompanied by a fire storm of respectful publicity, illustrated with photographs of the author looking pensive or, in some instances, mildly worried, as if he had let himself in for some discouraging words.

He is right. Readers who do not understand what the hubbub is about will leave this book little the wiser. Brodkey is obviously talented, but his skills are quirky and obsessive, perhaps more mesmerizing to him than to casual spectators. There is Innocence, for example, which contains what is probably the longest description of oral sex in the history of literature. (This story decidedly did not appear in The New Yorker.) For page after page a Harvard undergraduate named Wiley tries to bring his stubbornly unresponsive girlfriend to orgasm: “The whitish bubbling, the splash of her discontinuous physical response: those waves, ah, that wake rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell. Rose, curled outward, bubbled, and fell.” Little in this prose marathon is particularly erotic or offensive; it is possible for long periods of time to forget entirely what is supposed to be going on. The point of the exercise seems to be verbal ingenuity, coupled with the message that pleasure can be damned hard, long work.

In contrast to such hyperpituitary passages, On the Waves opens with a comparatively terse Venetian scene: “In the churning wake of a motorboat from one of the luxury hotels, the gondola bobbed with graceful disequilibrium. The tall, thin, handsome man sitting in the gondola gripped the sides of the small wooden craft and said to his seven-year-old daughter, ‘Hold on.’ He thought, Gondolas are atavistic.” Never mind that adjectives here are pulling more weight than they ought to bear. The real problem is the terminal apercu. Nothing that follows in this brief, intermittently charming story about a man and his daughter quite obliterates an annoying question: How, exactly, are gondolas atavistic?

Brodkey’s central subject is the suffering child. The anguish chiefly arises from the loss, real or imagined, of parents and their protection (Largely an Oral History of My Mother; His Son, in His Arms, in Light, Aloft). Brodkey’s family histories tend to stretch out as interminable catalogs of emotion, pain and bereavement alternating with epiphanic flashes of elation: “In my memories of this time of my life, it seems to be summer all the time, even when the ground is white: I suppose it seems like summer because I was never cold.” Moments like this almost redeem the strenuous labors that Brodkey and his readers must suffer through to achieve them. Because of his fascination with autobiographical minutiae, his willingness to spin elaborate riffs on the smallest physical details, Brodkey’s proponents regularly compare him to Proust. The analogy may someday prove accurate, but this book does not make the case. Perhaps Party of Animals, which is rumored to be sprawling and multivolumed, will demonstrate Proustian breadth, the ability to evoke an entire, glittering world from a mass of perceptions. For now, the sharpest impression given by Brodkey is of an artist entranced, and imprisoned, by a narrow range of self-preoccupations.