Harold Brodkey is usually the chronicler of a personal and serious form of modern memory. His efforts are direct and, save for one or two exceptions, unambiguous: his fiction details the lives and los...
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In the following review, French offers a laudatory assessment of The Abundant Dreamer.
Harold Brodkey has an extraordinary, almost subterranean, reputation among a small group of readers and critic...
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In the following review, Bromwich offers a stylistic analysis of The Runaway Soul.
The words “narcissist” and “solipsist” are sometimes used interchangeably, but they ha...
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In the following review, Sage submits a favorable assessment of Profane Friendship.
That he has set this tale in Venice makes Harold Brodkey seem more “placeable” in all sorts of ways...
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In the following review, Tóibín compares The Runaway Soul to Profane Friendship, maintaining the latter novel “does not match up to The Runaway Soul in style or scope; it is too l...
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In the following review, Jacobs deems Profane Friendship “an ambitious but unsuccessful novel.”
Set in 1930s Venice during narrator Niles O'Hara's childhood and adolesce...
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In the following review, Als commends Brodkey's unique narrative style.
A penchant for projecting my life into the margins of almost any writer's text was tempered when, at the age of...
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In the following review, Rothstein places Stories in an Almost Classical Mode within the context of Brodsky's oeuvre, deeming it an “unsettling book, far different from Brodkey's ...
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In the following mixed review, Josipovici considers The Runaway Soul an ambitious but deeply flawed novel.
Harold Brodkey is a very modern phenomenon. For over twenty years he has been famous in li...
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In the following positive review, Adams provides a stylistic examination of Brodkey's The Runaway Soul.
Harold Brodkey's big book The Runaway Soul appears before us trailing a long pr...
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In the following derogatory review, Parrinder disparages The Runaway Soul as “formless, plotless and graceless.”
‘This man has been called America's greatest writer,...
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In the following review, Binding offers a mixed assessment of The Runaway Soul.
The great contemporary American psychologist, James Hillman, sees soul as “the poetic basis of mind” th...
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In the following review, Rubin asserts that “The Runaway Soul turns out to be as bad as the most pessimistic critic might have predicted.”
Reviewers seem to have been sharpening their...
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In the following review, Davis criticizes what he preceives as pretension, posturing, and lack of coherence in The Runaway Soul.
Harold Brodkey's unreadable magnum opus [The Runaway Soul], a...
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In the following interview, Brodkey discusses his time at Harvard, his creative process, and his attitude toward fame.
For the past thirty years Harold Brodkey has pursued a path unique in American...
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Harold (Roy) Brodkey
Critical Review by Sean French
