{"id":5968,"date":"2025-04-06T11:30:34","date_gmt":"2025-04-06T18:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5968"},"modified":"2025-04-06T11:31:33","modified_gmt":"2025-04-06T18:31:33","slug":"books-on-cities-harold-brodkey-my-venice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5968","title":{"rendered":"Books on Cities: Harold Brodkey, My Venice"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-full is-resized\"><center><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1029\" height=\"1547\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Harold-Brodkey-My-Venice.webp\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5969\" style=\"width:450px\" srcset=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Harold-Brodkey-My-Venice.webp 1029w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Harold-Brodkey-My-Venice-768x1155.webp 768w, http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Harold-Brodkey-My-Venice-1022x1536.webp 1022w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1029px) 100vw, 1029px\" \/><\/center><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Harold Brodkey put out his first novel <em>The Runaway Soul<\/em> at the age of 61. He did so after enjoying more than thirty years of literary notoriety, if &#8220;enjoying&#8221; be the word. Since the late nineteen-fifties, he&#8217;d been publishing only short stories and <em>New Yorker <\/em>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 <em>The Runaway Soul <\/em>was greeted by reviews now remembered \u2014 if, like the book itself, remembered at all \u2014 as career-endingly harsh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yet Brodkey&#8217;s career didn&#8217;t end: he wrote a second novel, and did so, in fact, in just one year. Where the not-quite-universally-savaged <em>The Runaway Soul <\/em>centers on his longtime alter-ego Wiley Silenowicz, an adopted child who grows up in nineteen-thirties St. Louis, <em>Profane Friendship<\/em> centers on Niles O&#8217;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 href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/the-paper\/v16\/n10\/colm-toibin\/insiderish\">a contemporary <\/a><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/the-paper\/v16\/n10\/colm-toibin\/insiderish\">London Review of Books <\/a><\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lrb.co.uk\/the-paper\/v16\/n10\/colm-toibin\/insiderish\">piece<\/a>, Colm T\u00f3ib\u00edn notes that &#8220;there are times when the description of Venice seems to be written by numbers,&#8221; quoting the following: &#8220;February\u2019s an alphabetical light, pale with dark shadows like lines and blotches on a page. We played in the beckoning and slightly motional, slightly <em>vulgar<\/em>, pallid and yellowish light of March.&#8221;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><em>Read the whole thing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.booksoncities.com\/p\/harold-brodkey-my-venice-1998\">at Substack<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8220;enjoying&#8221; be the word. Since the late nineteen-fifties, he&#8217;d been publishing only short stories and New Yorker pieces, and somewhere along the line, as the repeatedly promised [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,101,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-books-on-cities","category-italy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5968"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5971,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5968\/revisions\/5971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}