SOURCE: Scull, Andrew. “Losing the One You Love.” Times Literary Supplement n.s. (15 November 1996): 15.

In the following review, Scull unfavorably compares Brodkey's This Wild Darkness to Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast.

Harold Brodkey was a marvellous person: physically irresistible, profoundly original, immensely intelligent, an extraordinary conversationalist—someone who inevitably incurred the unremitting envy and wrath of many members of the mean-spirited New York literary scene, as well as a well-deserved if insufficient fame that transcended national boundaries. And he was besides “a wonderful and a great writer”. Or so he tells us.

What is such a fellow to do, when he discovers that he has been sentenced to a miserable, lingering death at the hands of an indiscriminate microbe, a vicious virus evidently determined to erase him, heedless of his supreme talents and value to the world? Why, write, of course. Cast aside all sense of privacy and discretion...