SOURCE: Sage, Lorna. “The World and I.” Times Literary Supplement n.s. (1 April 1994): 21.

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. His first novel, Runaway Soul—so long-gestated, so notorious in advance, so aggressively take-it-as-brilliant or leave it—suffered horribly (some thought wonderfully) from his transparent determination to wrestle himself inwardly into the role of the Great American writer. This time he is taking a step back, putting it in a certain perspective—“it” being the same old ambition, what else, this is his subject—but here his exacerbated and jealous anxiety of influence acquires an appropriate world. For Venice is a commonplace of twentieth-century fiction, an imaginative meeting-point and a market of images, where you brush shoulders with James and Mann, Calvino and Coover...