BOOKS
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result, the merger of the literary and the political imagination has worked
both ways: not only have political intellectuals, particularly on the left, be–
come more entrenched in a moral and ideological pluralism, based on the ex–
perience of art, but the approach to literature has often been politicized, flat–
tened out, given a social responsibility it cannot sustain. In this setting, the
austerities of modernism are made to seem anachronistic, while both literary
and political thinking give the appearance of being more in step with the
world today.
WILLIAM PHILLIPS
BRODKEY ON LOVE
STORIES IN AN ALMOST ClASSICAL MODE. By
Harold
Brodkey.
MfTed
A.
Knopf. $24.45.
For several decades the New York literary cognoscenti have
recognized Harold Brodkey, born in 1930, as one ofAmerica's most serious
narrative writers since Norman Mailer burst on the scene in the late 1940s
with
The Naked and the Dead.
In
New York Magazine's
cover story on
Brodkey - "The Genius" - Yale's high priest of the humanities, Harold
Bloom, was quoted as calling him "an American Proust ... unparalleled in
American prose fiction since the death of William Faulkner"; Denis
Donoghue announced: ''There is no one writing in American literature at
all
comparable." Susan Sontag says: "Brodkey is going for the big stakes - I
read every word he writes." Brodkey clearly is the favorite writer of the
high-powered intellectuals, but until this past year his literary reputation has
remained somewhat
sotto voce;
although his novella-length short stories have
appeared in
The New Yorker,
Brodkey has chosen to avoid publication of his
long Proustian opus,
Party of Animals.
His wife, the writer Ellen Schwamm,
has frequently had to remove completed portions of the narrative from
Brodkey.
Several years before that novel is due to appear, Knopf published
Brodkey's
Stories in an Almost Classical Mode;
the resonance from the
book's appearance was unprecedented for a volume of short stories. The lit–
erary world seemed to wake from its deep commercial slumber of the past
decade - though Brodkey's only previously published book was
First Love
