There are eighteen stories in Stories, several of them novella-length, not all of them gems. (The novel finally appeared in 1991, and made an 835-page flop, but that’s a story in an almost classical mode for another day.) In 1988 he published his second book, a six-hundred-page collection of those fragments that somehow was not the promised novel, but rather Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.
” looks “like a statue that had been rubbed with honey and warm wax, to get a golden tone, and he carried at all times, in the neatness of his features and the secret proportions of his face and body that made him so handsome in that particular way, the threat of seduction.” But the other six stories offer diminishing returns, and Brodkey spent the next thirty years bluffing about an epic novel that kept failing to materialize save in sporadic fragments appearing in the New Yorker and other magazines.
Sure, “The State of Grace,” the title story, and “The Quarrel” form a brilliant little trilogy, sharing a narrator and depicting a midcentury adolescence made numinous by yearning-economic, intellectual, cultural, erotic take your pick if you can tell them apart. IS HAROLD BRODKEY THE GREATEST-or at any rate, the most lauded-writer who never produced a great book? His 1958 debut, First Love and Other Sorrows, was a big hit but hasn’t aged well.
