Customer Reviews

Stories In An Almost Classical Mode

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Brodkey breaks so many rules of narration in this collection of stories that he can be judged aptly by no standards other than his own. Unfortunately, this means that much of his genius is often overlooked. questedj@aol.com writes that _Stories in an Almost Classical Mode_ focusses too much on the pain of Brodkey's childhood and adolescence, and its appeal therefore is solely "prurient." I disagree. In _A Story in an Almost Classical Mode_, for example, we see not only his mother's cruelty and madness as she physically and emotionally degenerates. We see the portrait of a boy who must figure out how--against incredible odds--to build his personality, one part at a time. This is his genius. So many of us take the world for granted; our personalities guide us through and allow us to filter out what is harmful or unimportant. Brodkey's protagonists, for the most part, lack this ability--thus, they must constantly be in a state of flux, of becoming, rather than being.

Brodkey is murky, cloudy, discursive, brilliant, static, and often boring--in this collection, not in his First Love and Other Stories, written before he became a literary cult figure. If you've never read him, this is probably the best of his late fiction. Profane Friendship and Runaway Soul are all but unreadable. This Wild Darkness, which was edited by his wife, possibly for intelligibility, is a fantastic memoir and meditation on living and dying. I'd recommend, for a good blast of Brodkey the fiction writer, First Love and also Almost Classical Mode. The former presentes lucid, moving, beautifully written stories. The latter offers mandarin, inaccessible prose that seems to be trying to capture the mind as it oscillates from thought to thought, feeling to feeling. The result is a weird, involuted, sometimes compelling collection.

I'm reminded of the Native American character in the Jim Jarsmuch movie, "Dead Man" whose name is something along the lines of "He who talks alot but says very little."

I read First Love and Other Sorrows before this and was outraged that more people hadn't heard of this guy. Brodkey was around 25 or 26 when that first collection was published and sadly he hadn't learned much in the 20 or 30 intervening years. Except how to overwrite.

Can't remember the title but there was one story about a guy trying to give a woman an orgasm that may have the most mechanical and unintentionally funny descriptions of sex this side of Norman Mailer.

A weird combo of Updike and Mailer at their pompous "great writer" worst.

Even so, even bad Brodkey has its moments.

Never loan this book out to anyone--they'll never return it

Certain passages -- sometimes single sentences -- are so gorgeous they can make you stop and shudder and go back to reread them. The self-portrait that emerges is pretty appalling, but the force of his music overruns all objections.

Honesty compels me to confess: I stopped reading just over halfway through the book. When I reached, "Largely an Oral History of My Mother" [pg 323], I knew I was defeated; I had lost my will to continue. I sensed the possibility of coming trouble when the initial story failed to deliver sufficient reward for the effort; I read the second, and thought I had underrated the author's ability to sustain my interest. In fact, I liked it a LOT. So, too, "Hofstedt and Jean -- and Others," and "Innocence," as well. But then...the self-indulgent, narcissism, painful, banal, self-absorbtion began to gnaw at my interest, nibbling relentlessly at the raw edges of pleasure, until, finally, by the time I completed "The Pain Continuum," I had begun to root for Big Sister! A few more well-placed whacks of the broomstick, and I might have been SPARED the author's endless whining. My appreciation for the daily grind of psychiatrists, who listen to the unedited versions of this [junk] day-in and day-out, has taken a giant leap.

I have largely mixed feelings about this book. Some of the stories are incredible, completely impossible to put down, unbelievable, and, I will say seriously, and this is no small accomplishment, as Proustian as Proust himself. I'm serious.

Others fall horribly short. My least favorite was Him in his father's arms, or whatever the title of that story was. it's something close.

HOWEVER, based simply on a few of the stories in this book, I think the entire thing is a "worthy" read. I've only read this brodkey, so I don't know his earlier work. The thing is, in one amazon review of his first book, a person titles the review, "This guy's got guts." And that's true.

I will say, with some seriousness, that "Innocence" is not only one of the most gutsy stories I've ever read, ever. It's probably some of the best twenty-odd pages of fiction I've ever read. I'm not sure I'm aloud by amazon's rules to go into the specifics of the story. The majority of the story is based on one sexual experience. But it's not about a "sexual" experience. It's about a whole heck of a lot more.

Do I recommend the book? Yes. Is it entirely perfect? Far from it. But it's worth it.

A lot of what people say of Brodkey's work is true: he's ponderous, unendurable, brilliant, unreadable and fascinating. One thing I can say of him without question: "Innocence" is the best story about sex ever written, and I mean ever. By the time you get to the end, it is almost as if an orgasm erupts in your brain.

There are some real gems in this collection; "Ceil," for instance,is a wonder. I liked some of the stories and didn't like others, but when Brodkey is at his best his work is very moving.

Prior to Stories in An Almost Classical Mode, I had read Brodkey's First Love and Other Sorrows. I thought First Love approached greatness in many places, and the way he turned certain phrases bordered on the brain-burning experiences of great storytellers like Faulkner, Wolff, and Dubis. In Stories, Brodkey still has the gift for making magic, but his choice of topic leaves much to be desired. In the few selections included that do not deal with his parentage and lineage, his stories are worthwhile and provocative, though not as well-turned as in First Love. The lion's share of the material, however, deals with the horror that was his life. It is not edifying, to say the least. But it isn't just that; it's not instructive or interesting. This book is probably inventive and exciting to a psychology/literature major in a university, but beyond that, its scope is limited to the prurient side of all of us that likes to leer at the crude and pathetic. Brodkey had horrible experiences in his formative