There has also been an extraordinary amount of gossip and opinionated talk about the author’s career, much of it provoked by Brodkey’s own personality, some of it inspired by the special reach of his literary ambition, even more of it centering on the prolonged and apparently turbulent process of editorial consideration and reconsideration, which has now resulted in a first, but monumental, novel by an author entering his sixties.Īt first survey The Runaway Soul resembles, and in many detailed passages it reads like, yet another example of that familiar fictional type, the novel of development, for which German criticism has provided the name of Bildungsroman. Associated and overlapping materials have already been published in two collections of short stories ( First Love and Other Sorrows, 1958, and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, 1989). Harold Brodkey’s big book The Runaway Soul appears before us trailing a long prepublication history, many high commendations, and a counterfoil of questioning if not derogatory comments.
