SOURCE: Toíbín, Colm. “Insiderish.” London Review of Books 16, no. 10 (26 May 1994): 7.

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 long and self-indulgent; some of it is only half-imagined.”

One of the early chapters in Harold Brodkey's first novel The Runaway Soul is entitled ‘The River’. The narrator, after his father's death, returns to a landscape which he had known in early childhood. Some of the prose is plain and clear: ‘At the mouth of the stream, where it emptied into the inlet, under willows, lay a very large, ungainly river dinghy. It was greenish and heavy, made of thick and heavy pieces of wood, scarred and scratched, peeling and warped, moored to a ring in the trunk of a willow.’ But Brodkey...