SOURCE: Binding, Paul. “Worlds Turn.” New Statesman & Society 4, no. 179 (29 November 1991): 40.

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” that converts “events into experiences” and stands in intimate and perpetual relation to death. “The soul is not unconscious … The psyche is constantly making intelligible statements.”

Such thinking surely permeates Brodkey's long, ambitious, questing novel. With indomitable energy, it attempts to find how events, whether “true” or not, are translated into experiences that will influence the soul's dialogue with the world. Hillman also opposes “soul” to “spirit”: spirit insisting on unity, soul being nurtured by diversity. This idea informs the novel. Spirit leads to totalitarianism; attention to the needs of soul to the pluralism necessary for sane living. For all its ruthless concern with the individual predicament, The Runaway Soul...