SOURCE: Jacobs, Rita D. A review of Profane Friendship. World Literature Today 69, no. 1 (winter 1995): 137-38.

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 adolescence, Profane Friendship presents itself at first as a love story that, as it unfolds, becomes an indulgent and obsessive tale of homoerotic fascination. That the setting suggests such a clear allusion to von Aschenbach and Tadzio's journeys through these same canals and dark calles is unfortunate in that Harold Brodkey's novel falls so far short of the magic of Thomas Mann's classic novella.

Brodkey establishes his first-person narrator quickly as an old man recalling his youth and adolescence in Venice. After several short but affecting chapters about young Niles's family and his relationships with his parents and brother Carlo, we meet Onni, who becomes the rather tiresome focus for...