About book Stories In An Almost Classical Mode (1989)
If this isn’t the single largest non-Collected Stories collection of stories published in the modern era, it’s close enough that I totally could have lied about it just now and no one even remotely familiar with the work of Harold Brodkey would have raised an eyebrow. To the extent that Brodkey is remembered at all today, it is as a literary blowhard of the highest order, a writer whose perversely verbose self-examinations painted the pages of the New Yorker for decades, with their author perpetually toiling under a set of near-mythic expectations until crapping out five or six mammoth volumes of prose in the years leading up to his 1996 death, the long-awaited Runaway Soul representing, as one critic put it, “one of the [great] literary fiascos of all-time.” (Courtesy of the hilariously hatchety cherry-picked "criticism" section of Brodkey's wiki page.)I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to best describe my first Brodkey experience, explain my reaction to the reactions, and ask you to bask with me in the utterly entrancing goofiness of the Brodkey myth. Let's start with SEX. In "Innocence" Brodkey spends more than ten pages solely on the act of cunnilingus, as Wiley, his career-spanning alter ego, attempts to bring his girlfriend, an enigmatic beauty long sought-after not only by himself, but by his entire senior class, to orgasm for the first time. Yes, as in ever, as in not-Brodkey has taken on the task of applying his limitless virility towards making this poor neglected girl come, where so many other, lesser, boys have failed before. This is after the girl, Orra, has already—immediately—acquiesced to Wiley's first-date "move" of simply lying naked in bed when she comes to meet him in his dorm room.What proceeds is a lengthy description of Wiley's quest, interrupted by searching internal monologues in which he ruminates on the profound ego-fuck that is the female orgasm and its ability to function as a malleable White Whale-worthy metaphor for any and everything that passes through Wiley's mind as he explores that "partly dream-laden dark water or underwater thing." A certain kind of reader might demand to know: to what end do Wiley's constant reflections contribute? Do they represent a genuine critique of how men perceive female sexuality, of our fear and insecurity and ultimate ignorance? or are they simply a transparent method through which Brodkey may 'earn' the moment when, after twenty pages of foreplay and fucking, he does indeed bring Orra to a series of earth-shattering orgasms, the effects of which prompt her to bitterly curse any and all past lovers who weren't Wiley?: "I always knew they were doing it wrong, I always knew there was nothing wrong with me..." (p. 193)The considerate lover's immediate reaction upon reading that may be something like Damn Right, Girl, which helps to mitigate the notion that the story's narrative trajectory mimics the basest of male wish-fulfillment fantasies, which, really, is hard for me to find very distasteful considering the rapturously erotic effect of Brodkey's prose and just how innately he understands ecstasy. In his fascinating, contentious set of Bookworm interviews , it's revealed that "Innocence" would be a completely different story if Brodkey of "today" had written it, which is emblematic of what I see as the collection's central conflict, posed by the retirement-aged protagonist of "Hofstedt and Jean—and Others": "Can a man indicate and not vindicate his own geography?" (p. 95). Brodkey's chief struggle is with the subjective stain of memory, and it's a glorious one to witness, particularly when it is mirrored aesthetically. He is attempting to render into lush, hyper-literate prose consciousness in its most immediate and elemental form which, inevitably, produces passages possessed by a profound dissonance: present-day Brodkey gloriously, futiley attempting to re-create the minute sensations of his childhood. Sometimes, this works beautifully, as in "The Pain Continuum" and its near-unbearably perfect rendering of childhood explorations of violence, but it can really get to be a bit much: "He applies a male, pale lacquer of breath outside a syllable so that are you smiling has in the final breath of each syllable, in the paling and dwindling r and in the fluted u and the vertically falling and rising narrow i and in the pursed and then flung-open ling, an untoned wind of poetic intention: 'Ahrrr--uhhhh--ahh YuHuuUuuuu uhhhhh ahhh SMIIIIII ieh, eh, ehhh, LINGggg--ahhhhhh uhhhhh uhhhh.'" (S.L., p. 449) The stories are arranged in chronological order and, by the time we hit the 80s, advance into almost complete abstraction, with each of the last five pieces centering on a pivotal event in Wiley's life—walking hand in hand with his adopted father, being spoonfed by his doting nanny, an intensely sensual episode of homoerotic exploration—and suspending all notions of time and space in pages and pages of impressionistic reminiscing. The alternately astonishing, infuriating, and deeply funny collection-closer "Angel" has Brodkey pushing the efforts of his creation to a celestial breaking point, from which we may extract as definitive a realization as he ever comes to: "The Angel's Colors were, of course, ungraspable by the mind or memory, the many-fingered, hundred-handed mind. The unfingered but shoving memory had no chance. Memory shoves things forward, but only the mind can hold or handle images, can study them. Memory can show things to me as I understood them once, not usually in their presence but in an early memory or daydream or dream at night; that's all it can do." (Angel, p. 584)I regret spending so much time on the Wiley stuff, since the rest of the collection compellingly illustrates that Brodkey can adopt a variety of narrative voices. The best of these is probably the famed "Verona: A Young Woman Speaks" which I don't really want to talk about since it was the last thing I read to my girlfriend before she broke up with me. I would have read her "Innocence", but, y'know, expectations.
RACCONTA UN SACCO DI BUGIE SE VUOI AVERE UNA VITA FELICEHo letto che Brodkey è considerato il Proust americano – poi ho letto che è l’anello mancante tra Proust e David Foster Wallace. Adesso mi aspetto di leggere che lo si ama o lo si odia, tanto per restare nei commenti che non significano nulla, e niente aggiungono o spiegano.Brodkey sceglie un altro titolo bello e perfetto: storie in modo quasi classico, dopo primo amore e altri affanni. Che meraviglia.In queste pagine, ci sono bambini che conoscono illuminazioni. Ci sono ragazzini di undici, dodici, tredici anni che cominciano a diventare uomini, alla soglia dell’adolescenza, nel rito di perdita dell’innocenza, nell’età in cui si è con la mente più acuta degli angeli. C’è tanto sesso: oltre il famoso racconto con la lunghissima descrizione di un cunnilingus (Innocenza), che non dura tutto il racconto come qualcuno mitizza, ma fa parte di una lunga scopata piena di tutto, amore incluso, splendido racconto – oltre questo, c’è una masturbazione di gruppo (scout), c’è la scoperta del piacere sessuale col proprio sesso. Ci sono frammenti di luce alla deriva, come ombre di foglie, dettagli della giornata, ugualmente transitori. C’è grande capacità di maneggiare le sensazioni e le emozioni, e il ricordo in modo magistrale. Ci sono persone che hanno la schiena trafitta da un pesante abbozzo d’ali, che si trasformano, crescono, diventano, vivono. Ci sono pochi fatti, poche cose che succedono, e non se ne sente la mancanza: tanto Brodkey racconta la vita, che è quello che conta, chi ha bisogno dei fatti?Quando ero piccolo ogni tanto riuscivo a mettere le mani su un barattolo di latte condensato: facevo due buchi, uno per bere, l’altro per fare entrare l’aria – e comunque, dovevo succhiare forte, perché il latte era davvero condensato, difficile da estrarre. Se ero vorace, se mi lasciavo prendere dall’ingordigia, finivo un po’ stomacato dal troppo zucchero, dall’eccesso di sapore forte e intenso. Invece, se ero ragionevole, il piacere era assicurato. Molto spesso leggere questi racconti mi ha riportato a galla questo ricordo.Non sono tutti alla stessa altezza, qualcuno fatica ad andare giù: forse perché il protagonista quando diventa adulto fa di professione il regista, e Brodkey dipinge una caricatura del metteur en scene, finta e banale; forse perché in un altro racconto, lo scrittore e professore Hofstedt è davvero antipatico e somiglia troppo a certi personaggi di Philip Roth. Qua e là, mi aspettavo un personaggio esprimersi con una battuta del tipo “Mi fanno male i capelli”, e certo non in memoria di Amelia Rosselli. Però non è successo, è stato piuttosto Brodkey a esprimersi con un “mani da prete azteco” che mi ha lasciato perplesso. In queste zone del libro, Brodkey secca invece di asciugare, recide invece di sciogliere, esaspera invece di ammorbidire, insiste invece di sfumare.Ma la sensazione vincente e dominante è quella del piacere, del dolce denso e corposo di un latte condensato. Mi piace il salto rapido di un buon racconto, l'emozione che spesso comincia già nella prima frase...PSGordon Lish è stato editor di Brodkey e di Carver: due pesi e due misure, il minimo che si può commentare.
Do You like book Stories In An Almost Classical Mode (1989)?
I loved this book, though I'm not sure I would recommend it to most readers. The pieces that seem to be Brodkey at his most essential aren't really stories (or so I think would be the common complaint). "A Story in an Almost Classical Mode," for example, is really a 50-page character sketch (transparently fictionalized) of his step-mother--brilliant stuff, but no plot to speak of. (Perhaps the most amazing thing is that the story was originally published in the New Yorker, which tells you how conservative that magazine's fictional tastes have become since 1973.) "The Boys on Their Bikes" is similarly unconcerned with plot: in 32 pages, the boys of the title ride their bikes up one side of a small hill and down the other--no flashbacks, no back story, a few lines of traded dialogue. Even the more traditionally structured stories (for example, "Hofstedt and Jean--and Others," one of my favorites) are way, way more talky and ruminative than most contemporary fiction. Other favorites: "The Abundant Dreamer," "On the Waves," "Puberty," "Largely an Oral History of My Mother," "Ceil." Thanks to Christine Schutt for this recommendation.
—Geoff Wyss
