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Innocence Harold Brodkey3/13/2021
In the end we must keep reading as Wiley must keep licking and fondling and thrusting at poor Orra, determined to get at some kind of elusive final outcome.His great work, a novel that was widely speculated (by Brodkey as well as his fans) to be a masterpiece, was a perpetual work in progress.For decades the public awaited the arrival of the magnum opus he titled Party of Animals, contenting themselves with rumors and leaked portions of the manuscript that were published as short stories, while Brodkey cultivated an air of genius born of anticipation.
In thirty years, he published only a handful of stories in the New Yorker, Esquire and the (now defunct) American Review, collected in the volumes First Love and other Sorrows, published in 1957, Women and Angels, published in 1985 and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, published in 1988 a sort of greatest hits of Harold Brodkey. Before his death of AIDS in 1996, he completed three more books in different genres, all of which would garner moderate praise, but nothing would ever come close to living up to the inflated potential that hung around him during his years of mystery. To date, two collections of stories (one nonfiction) have been published posthumously, rounding out his catalogue and going a little way toward restoring his former glory, and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, generally considered his best work, has been added to Harold Blooms widely cited Western Canon. A slim volume comprised of just eleven unusually short stories, Jesus Son created a buzz around Denis Johnson that none of his other seven novels, five plays or many books of poems have come close to replicating. Over the next several decades, while his personal life unraveled (Johnson is open about his struggles with drug and alcohol addiction and two failed marriages) and then was stitched back up (he has been clean and sober and happily married to his third wife for many years), he continued to produce novels and books of poetry. His early novels Angels, Fiskadoro and The Stars at Noon were praised by critics but never pushed him into the limelight. Innocence Harold Brodkey Series Of SemiIt was not until the publication of Jesus Son, a series of semi-autobiographical, very short stories that he claims to have dashed off quickly to pay off a debt to the IRS, that Johnson acquired moderate mainstream success (and an enthusiastic cult following). Denis Johnson and Harold Brodkey both write what has been called confessional work, and both admit to using autobiographical details. Both use first person narrators looking back on their pasta technique that uses the reflective language of a mature character to illuminate his younger self. They both prominently feature controversial or racy subject matter (primarily sex in Brodkeys case, drugs and dispossessed people in Johnsons). Johnson writes in a spare style reminiscent of Raymond Carver, whom he studied under at Iowa, though he packs the pages with gorgeously rendered, seemingly extraneous details that Carver would certainly leave out. The result is a stark, lyrical narrative that reads like a kind of poetry-prose. Brodkey, on the other hand, chronicles the minutia of his characters experiences with an almost relentlessly detailed focus and precision, building on the momentum of a single act or moment to the point where it can strain the readers patience. Both have been accused of writing elliptical prosethere is a reluctance in both to get to the point. For Brodkey and Johnson, the point does not seem to be the point. Instead, language is used to explore and finally to get at an emotional truth that cant be arrived at by more traditional means. It is not, for either writer, necessarily a fiction where things happen in a linear way that adds up to a momentous change for the protagonist. Instead, they seduce their readers with an almost visceral reading experience, where what at first appears disjointed or uneven gradually builds until it produces a feeling, an emotion, an authentic but unnamable realizationsomething like the effect of music. Then, having already sketched a fairly complete, sympathetic, Salingeresque character in just a few pages, Brodkey proceeds to spend the next thirty pages describing in rigorous, precise, seemingly boundless prose Wileys efforts to get (and at times almost to force) Orra to come. It is impossible, in reading the rest of the story, not to be swept up in the act, however quotidian, seemingly fruitless, exhausting and sometimes maddening it is to keep at it.
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