An ambitious book is a presumptuous book; it aims at a certain bull’s-eye. Then there’s another sort of great book–the kind that grows to such proportions out of the nature of the material or the artist’s own curiosity. Don Quixote is an example of this second type. But the ambitious writer assumes he knows what greatness is and sets out to achieve it. And perhaps this presumption actually causes books like these to fall short of their goals. Could it be that the Aeneid matters less to us than the Iliad in part because the former had a model and the latter didn’t?
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No one can accuse Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul of a lack of ambition. For almost 30 years the literary world has tittered and buzzed over rumors of the novel’s appearance. For those unacquainted with Brodkey’s history, this fire storm of expectation may seem hard to fathom. What, exactly, has transformed another first novel into the first novel? Back in 1958, Brodkey published a modest collection of nine stories called First Love and Other Sorrows, which a few reviewers greeted with immoderate praise. These reviewers seemed to feel that Brodkey “smelled of museums,” as Gertrude Stein said archly of Ernest Hemingway; he was stylish in a self-conscious way, serious (in those days a writer was considered serious if he wrote about either sex or the war), and modest in his oeuvre (critics are less generous with a proven talent). Brodkey immediately announced plans for a monumentally ambitious work, but for the next 30 years he published only small sections of it. Perhaps the very scarcity of the work enhanced its value. Those with the patience to track the pieces down were unwilling to disparage their own quest. Just as Woody Allen’s ostentatious breast beating over his artistic insecurities has produced the desired critical indulgence, Brodkey had hit on a ploy that has transformed natural adversaries into cooing grandparents holding out sugar cubes. In 1987 Douglas Seibold climbed on the bandwagon in the Reader: “Judging from the bits and pieces he’s published so far,” he wrote, “Harold Brodkey’s A Party of Animals [the working title at the time] will be one of the most important books of our time–if he ever finishes it.”
But Proust is tough to counterfeit. Like Alice, he was able to pass through his mirror into a vast, unexplored world; most writers who try to follow suit merely run into their own reflections. The difference with Proust was that he used the particulars of his life as the means to a larger end: exploring the nature of memory. Brodkey has no larger end. All the Proustian gestures end up being nothing more than gestures. Brodkey is like “the French Beethoven,” Saint-Saens: what you got wasn’t a composer of Beethoven’s stature but a composer rife with Beethovenian mannerisms. Mere imitators rarely catch their prey because they start with the person they’re imitating instead of going back to the artists their idol was imitating. In this case, Brodkey might have obtained a more organic Proustian feel by going back to Proust’s sources, Wagner and Ruskin. But there are no leitmotivs to pull The Runaway Soul into emotional coherence. Like Ruskin’s, Proust’s analysis is magical because it’s lucid and systematic, but Brodkey’s is elusive to say the least.
This book might have been a devastating portrait of an egomaniac if it had had some inkling of a critical or objective intent, but the preening is all too pervasive and unexamined, even compulsive. The pursuit of love may be the “official” theme, but what this book is really about is narcissism. And 835 pages is hardly long enough to accommodate Brodkey’s self-absorption. The strategies of Proust and Joyce are not even appropriated for effect, but as an outward sign of the league the author fancies himself to be playing in. Brodkey makes a weak attempt at self-disguise when he gives his narrator the name Wiley Silenowicz. But all the landmark details of Brodkey’s life are there, from being adopted to living in Saint Louis and going to Harvard. He even leaves the year of his birth the same. But his literary shadow resembles him nowhere more than in his garish vanity. For 30 years Brodkey has made statements like “I’m one of the people that people fight over” and “It’s just possible I am the voice of the coming age.” Someone who talks like that about himself is an idiot. And though some idiots do produce great art, The Runaway Soul makes it clear Brodkey is not one of them.
