Sea Battles on Dry Land: Essays (Hardcover)

by Harold Brodkey (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
The late Harold Brodkey made headlines in 1991 upon publication of his 835-page, 27-years-in-the-making epic novel, The Runaway Soul; fortunately for his fans, he'd been turning out enough short stories, journalism, and essays in the interim to mitigate the long, long wait. Sea Battles on Dry Land is a posthumously published collection of essays, many culled from the pages of the New Yorker, that cover such diverse topics as Woody Allen's romantic and legal woes, weather, the AIDS epidemic in New York, and the author's recollections of Frank O'Hara. Divided into sections titled "Celebrity and Politics;" "Wit and Whimsy;" "Life, Love and Sex;" and "Language and Literature," Brodkey's essays, like their subject matter, are a mixed bag ranging from the genuinely insightful to the egregiously self-serving. In "The Roar of the Canon" Brodkey brings considerable critical acumen to his discussion of John O'Hara, pointing out:

He did not work in the form in the ways that Fitzgerald and Hemingway did. He did not pursue any would-be essential social truth or analysis of community in his novels, as Dreiser and Faulkner did in theirs. Perhaps O'Hara knew his own fragility: Hemingway ended a suicide, after all. Perhaps O'Hara gambled ineptly but not suicidally: he stayed in the popular-serious mainstream.

What's more, the writing here is incisive, elegant, and refreshingly free of the kind of excesses on exhibit in a preceding essay, "Frank and Harold," a queasy mix of starstruck name-dropping ("We entered the Village like the Jews into Canaan. Frank and Ashbery and Larry Rivers greeted us") and tedious recollections of long-past sophomoric conversations ("Frank shouted that surrealism was dead. John or Frank shouted that the entire surface of the canvas mattered. John, I think, said that Auden had loosened the girdle of form"). Sea Battles on Dry Land is proof--if we needed it--that when he was good, Brodkey was very, very good, but when he was bad, he was purple. --Alix Wilber

From Publishers Weekly
The late writer best known for his fiction (First Love and Other Sorrows) demonstrates in this provocative, if somewhat uneven, collection of essays an impressive range, examining subjects as diverse as the Western literary canon, American fascism and Carol Burnet. Brodkey's styleAat once conversational, confessional and scholarlyAproves flexible enough to accommodate his diverse subjects. Particularly rewarding are his forays into literary criticism, an art he practices with rigor, precision and a striking seriousness of purpose, employing mercifully little jargon. "Jane Austen vs. Henry James," notwithstanding its flippant title, presents a convincing and elegantly argued case for the superiority of Austen, while his meditation on John O'Hara, "The Roar of the Canon," showcases an ability to discriminate between fluff and substance in other writers' claims to greatness. The shorter pieces in the collection, which appeared as "Talk of the Town" items in the New Yorker, are often unsatisfying, and several of the essays are unqualified disasters (in "The Woody Allen Mess," for example, Brodkey awkwardly ties reflections on his, and his fictional character Wiley Silenowicz's, status as adopted children with musings on celebrity culture). But these pieces show just how talented and careful a writer and critic Brodkey was, and how versatile the essay can be in such capable hands.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Metropolitan Books; 1st edition (April 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805060529
• ISBN-13: 978-0805060522
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,390,776 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars charming often brilliant & always beautiful ruminations, April 23, 1999

By A Customer

perhaps america's most underappreciated 20th century writer, brodkey's death in 1996 seems to be doing what the deaths of brilliant people tend to do: deliver the recognition they deserved in life. henry holt and owl books have republished many of his works, and now they have released a collection of his essays, most of which appeared in the new yorker over the past 50 years. he writes a fascinating essay on woody allen, celebrity, and perversity, forcing us to recognize that in some ways mr. allen's relationship with soon-yi makes sense--but he does not go so far as to approve of it. full of the psychological subtlety and accuracy of his fiction, this essay showcases brodkey's unique understanding of how we love, and why.

perhaps the standout piece in this collection is 'frank and harold.' a moving piece about his friendship with new york school poet frank o'hara, brodkey unsentimentally recalls the excitement and experimentation, the self-importance and actual importance, of the literary scene at harvard and in greenwich village during the late 40s and early 50s. it is a remarkable portrait of a scene, an era, and above all, a personality: that of frank o'hara.

brodkey writes about a wide range of topics, and he always has something insightful to say. if his essay "reading: the most dangerous game" doesn't make you rethink your relationship toward books, then you probably shouldn't be reading brodkey anyway.