Harold Brodkey put out his first novel The Runaway Soul at the age of 61. He did so after enjoying more than thirty years of literary notoriety, if “enjoying” be the word. Since the late nineteen-fifties, he’d been publishing only short stories and New Yorker pieces, and somewhere along the line, as the repeatedly promised full-length debut repeatedly failed to appear, his golden-boy reputation turned somehow villainous. During the first half of his career, he seems to have been regarded as a potential American Proust; during the second, as a bloviating, quasi-malevolent egoist, bent on inflicting his torturously convoluted, near-parodically self-obsessed prose on the innocent reading public. When it appeared, the 800-page-long The Runaway Soul was greeted by reviews now remembered — if, like the book itself, remembered at all — as career-endingly harsh.
Yet Brodkey’s career didn’t end: he wrote a second novel, and did so, in fact, in just one year. Where the not-quite-universally-savaged The Runaway Soul centers on his longtime alter-ego Wiley Silenowicz, an adopted child who grows up in nineteen-thirties St. Louis, Profane Friendship centers on Niles O’Hara, a famous novelist remembering his youth in the Venice around that same period. Though primarily set in Venice, it does fall short of being a book about it. In a contemporary London Review of Books piece, Colm Tóibín notes that “there are times when the description of Venice seems to be written by numbers,” quoting the following: “February’s an alphabetical light, pale with dark shadows like lines and blotches on a page. We played in the beckoning and slightly motional, slightly vulgar, pallid and yellowish light of March.”
Read the whole thing at Substack.