BOOKS
473
clear masterpieces - in "Largely an Oral History of My Mother," Brodkey
tries to recall the painful blank space in his ear, which is the Yiddish spoken by
his real mother, in "A Story in an Almost Classical Mode." Conversely, he
envelops his readers inside the extraordinary American monologue of his
adoptive mother, a sort of lucky, plucky, shrewd, hysterical Molly Bloom
adrift in Saint Louis during World War Two. The 1940s, with its disrep–
utable, puckish atmosphere of an abundance of slightly black-market
things–
cars, gasoline, nylon stockings -laced with moral optimism, was a sexy time
for adolescents. Brodkey gets into our nostrils the smell of his mother's pur–
pley lipstick, the sportive look of the family car; spatially, we are inside the
family, their rusiling new clothes, their fragrances. Brodkey is an innovator in
his amazing ability to change, close down, and alter distances in his protago–
nists, and between them and his readers. The adoptive father loses his
money and dies of a heart attack, leaving behind, locked into a claustrophobic
lovelhate struggle, his wife, dying of cancer, and their prodigy stepson, on his
way to a Harvard scholarship and a third life.
I once remarked to Brodkey that it had occurred to me that the
excessive preoccupation with communism of those in the previous generation
was due to the fact that communism was probably the one thing they
weren't afraid to examine; as a subject it was relatively tame - it was the
other stuff they couldn't look at. Brodkey laughed, because "the other stuff' is
his domain - insanity, homosexuality, erotic love, death, money, and angels
flying over Harvard Square. (Angels are more popular in European fiction
than American.) In "Play," two boys - "Meanwhile I was a child. The chil–
dren I knew hugged and seduced thousands" - play Tarzan. One of them,
unaware of his own physicality, has an orgasm during their roiling about. In
one of Brodkey's epiphanies, the workings of the boy's body are revealed to
him, and, almost tangentially, the reader. At the end of the final story in the
book, "Angel," Brodkey concludes with an apt description of his endeavor:
"In the end, what was startling was that no one testified at the time. Or
rather, it was all journalism and shock at first. And them came lyric attempts,
and much cross-referencing back and forth. Only after many years were
there convincing but frail and as if whispered attempts at honesty, of which
this is one." In these sludgey times, Brodkey remains one of our few novel–
ists writing as though the gods are still watching.
BARBARA PROBST SOLOMON
