ANNOTATION

No writer at work today has plumbed the vagaries of a mind in action with the daring and insight of Harold Brodkey, the author of Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. This mesmerizing and heartbreaking novel extends to the reader a rare chance to change his understanding of himself and his world, as the author offers an unparalleled access to the inner world of another human being.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Acclaimed New Yorker writer Brodkey set the literary world ablaze with this much-talked-about debut novel--a literary tour de force about an adopted child in the early 1930s who is raised in the St. Louis household of his cousins. "Impressive. . . . The work of a lifetime. . . . As haunted by love, death, and madness as The Oresteia".--Washington Post Book World.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

The Novel We Have All Been Waiting For turns out to be a sometimes brilliant evocation of the condition of being, pulsing with sensory imagery and with flashes of insight about the inherent qualities of good and evil and the presence of death in life. Brodkey's prose is supple, playful, often lyrical, but his obsession with words and the sensations they evoke is a detriment to dramatic tension. Thus the novel is also flabby, bloated, overwritten, overwrought, often tediously self-indulgent. Exquisitely sensitive and introspective Wiley Silenowicz looks back over a painful childhood and youth spent with his foster parents, Lila and S.L., and his slightly crazy half-sister, Nonie. His stream-of-consciousness narration is an attempt to resolve his relationships with all of them, especially with obnoxious, manipulative Nonie, whom he may have cheated of her parents' love. In a series of vignettes, slowly (too slowly) accruing into the story of his life, Wiley's neuroses are examined and explained, most of them attributable to the suppurating wound of his natural mother's death. In some respects Brodkey is a master of his craft. His ear for dialogue is beautifully tuned, especially in capturing Lila's insistent, cliche-laden, brassy voice. His meditations on language and his attempts to express the essence of an experience are provocative (although in some nearly interminable chapters, such as one called On Nearly Getting Laid, the repetition of minute detail renders sex virtually unerotic). Moreover, since these characters have already appeared in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode , much of the time the reader feels a sense of deja vu. In the end, the sheer wizardry of words tumbling on the page, the turbulent torrent of memories and desires, contribute to an intriguing fugal meditation on existence but do not amount to a compelling novel. (Nov.)

Library Journal

The most famous unpublished work in America, Brodkey's eagerly anticipated novel has finally arrived--dense, ambitious, and over 800 pages long. Its hero is Wiley Silenowicz, adopted in 1930 and raised by his cousins S.L. and Lila Silenowicz in St. Louis. Not quite as crafty as his name, but possessed of a fiercely observant intelligence that unfolds experience endlessly like a flower, Wiley must abide a glamorous, self-absorbed mother, an obnoxious sister, and a smooth-talking father who says things like, ``I won't wear another man's shoes . . . but I'll tell another man's jokes. . . . I'm the father to another man's child.'' In the course of the novel, Wiley grows up, observes his parents, suffers his sister, experiences sexual longing and then sex. In short, nothing much happens except language--Brodkey's lush, carefully observed antidote to minimalism that will alternately enthrall and exasperate readers. The result? Brilliant, maddening, and essential for readers of good literature everywhere. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/91.-- Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal''

Kirkus Reviews

Brodkey's long, long, long-awaited first novel that could not possibly live up to expectations—and yet, largely, does. One must forgive Brodkey or oneself for not being able to take in every page of this 800-page novel with equal thirst. Tedious passages, reread later, spring to life—and some remain tiresome (for now). The story focuses on the childhood, youth, and first marriage (not in that order!) of Wiley Silenowicz, a Missouri genius, and the role of his hideously vile-tempered sister Nonie as a shadow in all people Wiley meets or marries. Earlier sketches seen in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988) are mere charcoal prefigurings of what appears here—and seem pared and objective set beside the bathyspheric subjectivity of the novel. The plot?—a psychic web of small electrical events feeding and racing everywhere, and never stated formally. Nothing happens now: every action arrives through a veil, often at merciless length. Wiley, at two, has been adopted by S.L. and Lila of St. Louis, who have a blood-daughter, Nonie, 11 years older than Wiley. Nonie, who must give pain to be alive, rules the roost, and we follow her demonic life until her death by fire in her early 40s (Wiley tells this story, a hugely askew elegy, nearly 20 years after her death). Events include baby sensations as S.L. lifts up Wiley and walks about filling him with fatherly advice; Lila's fabulous car accident as she forgetfully drives her Buick into a bus, flees on three-inch heels wearing a fox neckpiece; masturbation solo and in tandem; vast sex scenes, one at 14, his first coupling (almost), which is forever interrupted by Nonie, and a later sexfest with his deliberatelyinorgasmic wife Ora; trips with a homosexual older cousin; and separate death-scenes for S.L. and Lila, which spread all over the novel. Forget the Proust comparison. Brodkey is himself, and many pages here have the deep-rolling profound thrust, painterly originality, and lightning-bolt flash of great art. But many readers will fade early.

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