Fiction in Slow Motion
DAVIS, ROBERT GORHAM
Fiction in Slow Motion The Runaway Soul By Harold Brodkey Farrar Straus Giroux. 835pp. $30.00. Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor Emeritus of English, Columbia University Harold...
...Her face appeared on recruiting posters and she had a street at an air base named for her...
...We have to listen to the father's total vocabulary of nicknames and Yiddishisms, and Lila's total repertoire of clich?©s and folk sayings...
...Still nearer the novel's conclusion, and totally out of place after all we have been through, is a chapter describing Wiley's original initiation into mutual sex...
...The scene for the next 90 pages is the bedroom, with occasional trips to the bathroom...
...Leonie rhymes with Nonie...
...When Wiley seeks out his birthplace and the lesbian who lived carnally with his biological mother, an oldish woman asks, "Are you Aaron Weintraub...
...than with births...
...Brodkey gives this common experience the works, for it contains in germ the sex of all therest of the book...
...Two chapters intervene...
...Institutions hardly exist for him, or their histories...
...Tonight," Wileytellsus, "Ora wept in her sleep...
...Ora's father wanted her to go to bed with him in return for paying her Radcliffe fees...
...sort of," and later, "an awfullot of people were in love with me that year...
...Lila, his adoptive mother, and her daughter Nonie, several years older than he...
...From Who's Who we learn that this was Brodkey's real name before he was adopted...
...Or so he says...
...not blasphemous...
...that only 10 minutes have elapsed since last we saw them...
...His older sister Nonie drifts in and out, commenting sardonically...
...mostly there are cries and groans and finally shouts of ecstasy...
...Relatives of Wiley's adoptive parents have huge amounts of money...
...I can hear her soundlessly bumping into the thoughts that she is furnished inwardly with about sexuality and us...
...From childhood Wiley is called a genius...
...male target of the month...
...She said it did not matter...
...Amid the posturing and obfuscation we encounter pearls on nearly every page, but since, in a novel that lacks pattern and progression, they often have no connection with what precedes and follows them, there is no way of finding them except by reading every puzzling word, every frustrating sentence on The Runaway Soul's 800-plus pages...
...Wiley reads her sleeping mind...
...His adoptive father, addressing him with partly Yiddish baby talk, is always trying to get Wiley to kiss him on the mouth...
...He uses "American" and "Fascist" in quirky ways...
...The amount of sex in the novel is hard to exaggerate...
...This its throwaway ending usually admits...
...I was awake and lying beside her, nude, readingabookldidn'tlike...
...In a good mood he can create Turneresque landscapes, can coin aphorisms that would have delighted Auden, can celebrate the "greased-slimed wonder of sexual intercourse" in the religio-erotic language of a 16th-century mystic...
...In between are pages and pages of direct sex...
...Abruptly we are back in New York with Ora and Wiley that same evening in 1956, and told...
...What happens in the next 20 pages changes her mind...
...Wiley can no more separate his identity from hers than Catherine Earnshawin Wuthering Heigh ts could keep her identity from merging with Heathcliff s. Nonie ultimately burns to death while drunk...
...Brodkey did prepare us for this in some of his short stories, for instance in "Innocence," a 34-page tale that appeared originally in the New Yorker and was reprinted in his 1988 collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode...
...At the end Ora is asleep...
...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor Emeritus of English, Columbia University Harold Brodkey's unreadable magnum opus, a great disservice to literature, consists of 835 remorselessly difficult pages, 600 words to the page, and is so literally weighty that it is best read in bed supported by a pillow...
...Butmostlyhe creates things only to destroy them, states ideas only to deny them...
...They have been living together for four years...
...He "writes well," she says, "He's deep...
...SHE KILLED HERSELF NOISILY...
...Few words are uttered...
...Brodkey's career contains no equivalents...
...Hemarried Joanna Brown in June 1952, the month they received their ABs from Harvard and Radcliffe...
...When he and Ora walk into a crowded room at Harvard, people fall silent...
...Socially and politically he is as hard to pin down as Norman Mailer has come to be...
...The first night she slept with Wiley, Orra did not come...
...His conspicuous gifts are used wantonly and with obsessive repetition...
...Suicide is common among those Wiley knows...
...His caterpillar pace has done strange things to the text and its effect on readers...
...She regretted the suicide pills when it was too late, and "yelled until she died...
...Though Brodkey went to Harvard for four years and lived in Adams House, Wiley refers only slantingly (one of his favorite words) to college social events...
...Nonie had great success working for the Air Corps in World War II...
...A typical paragraph can be a single sentence of 40 lines, punctuated with dashes, enlivened by italics and boldface, but containing all that Brodkey thought of while writing it, until it has no coherent meaning at all...
...She said she had never comewith anyone at anytime...
...Masturbation is a plenum of hallucination, the aging author sedately writes...
...At the beginning of the 11th chapter of The Runaway Soul we encounter Wiley and Orra (now "Ora"), still in bed, orratherin bed again...
...Before Wiley was adopted, Lila gave birth to two infants who died early under mysterious circumstances...
...Brodkey has told interviewers that he worked on the novel for 27 years, an average production rate of less than three pages a month...
...The toilet paper was a strange commentary on the Torah...
...I know of no serious writer who goes so far, not Joyce, not Mailer, not Henry Miller...
...All Brodkey's dates in Who's Who match Wiley's...
...Wiley'sterms for physical sex, by contrast, are brutally one-syllabled...
...Every motion, every spoken phrase has an undermeaning that requires explanations...
...Orra is terrific, even by Harvard standards...
...So is aberrant sex...
...Nevertheless, Brodkey's characters impress others...
...Brodkey has been compared to Proust...
...Their talk, accusatory and denying, has to do with dangerous assaults Nonie may have carried out on neighborhood girls...
...To see her in sunlight was to see Marxism die...
...On first meeting her, people "often involuntarily lifted their arms as if about to fend off the brightness of the apparition...
...Itis New York in 1956, and Wiley has some reputation as a writer...
...At one point she joins the fun by draping naked Wiley in her scarf and putting lipstick on him...
...Now it is Wiley who is crying...
...His Jews are Jews chiefly by not being Jews...
...to carry us back to Wiley, aged six, listening to the rambling talk of the two principal women in his life...
...The last 20 pages of "Innocence" are devoted to telling how in 1951 or '52 a Harvard student, Wiley Silenowicz, produced orgasm in a Radclif f e student named Orra Perkins...
...At Harvard "I was in style, sort of...
...The conversation now is more discursive, more novelistic, though Wiley quite inexcusably tells us in detail how Ora will die at 58, by suicide after refusing treatment for pancreatic cancer...
...Two earlier collections came out in 1958 and '85...
...Of course, the New Yorkeris not completely wrong about Brodkey...
...The seducer is a "vaguely wolfish twenty-years girl" named Leonie...
...The landscape of Wiley's penis becomes as familiar as that of Cape Cod...
...Some scenes make us feel as if we were watching a tennis match in slow motion replay, with 10 seconds for every exchange at net, 15 for every serve...
...Her breath has the sound of a dry leaf on a marble floor...
...In the second half of the novel, Brodkey introduces six chapters (162 pages) on homosexuality, including Wiley's frequent but usually unsought experience of it...
...Brodkey as novelist is more comfortable with deaths, painful or prolonged deaths...
...KAZOW, KAZOWIE," the boy cries out...
...Most of his short fiction has been published by the New Yorker, which admires him vastly and where he has on occasion worked editorially...
...why, it is not clear...
...It takes 10 pages for Ora to wake up...
...those of his adoptive parents for instance...
...subtle, ingenious, metaphoric, inconclusive...
...Names mean a lot to Brodkey...
...Jealous little Nonie may have had something to do with the deaths, a theme or suspicion that recurs throughout the novel...
...My own sexuality is crudded up some or hidden or is defended in a labyrinth or by a combination lock...
...Brodkey was born in 1930, adopted in 1932...
...That is too much to ask of anyone...
...How true this is of the narrator we naturally cannot tell...
...They divorced 10 years later, after having a girl child whom the novel ignores...
...But Proust was influenced by Henri Bergson and John Ruskin, he was an admirer of George Sand, and he was an ardent activist in the Dreyfus case...
...or creates steps for it to emerge, sweetstinking monster thing, semi-ancient, sloppy, whatever...
...Forty pages of verbal and sexual intercourse follow...
...Of classrooms, professors, books read he says not a word...
...a typical Brodkey whimsy...
...Ora's father said "his father had been about to be appointed Secretary of State when he quarreled with John Hay and with Mark Hanna...
...Like Brodkey'sown writing, Silenowicz family life is full of assertions and denials, embraces and rejections, patternless and inconclusive...
...and hers unlocks it...
...At this time my life felt dreamed to me, dreamed by others as well as by me, while being clearly, achingly, brightly real...
...For variety (Ora's idea) they try making love on the window ledge...
...Murderous Nonie is the real heroine of the novel...
...Whooo-ahhhhhh -C6CCC...
...Brodkey keeps telling us that his characters are all liars, and even when not lying to others are selfdeceived...
...An early chapter called "Masturbation" is about what it punningly says it is, "a lad and his lamp" and the magic power he can release so easily...
...Ora's leg was "resting like a drugged boa constrictor without scales or menace on top of mine...
...Nonie's real name, Norah, rhymes with Ora ("aura...
...Wiley is six feet two and a quarter inches tall, 14 years old, and weighs 142 pounds...
...Indeed, Proust figures in the novel when Ora, weeping, reads his "stuff on jealousy and love...
Vol. 74 • December 1991 • No. 14
