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george_salis's review against another edition
2.0
"The runaway soul goes groping--and plunging--and flying and lying--and trying---and dying..." Yes it does.
"...the mind wanders among puzzles; minds wander: it is what minds do." Also, true. Especially in the case of this (anti-)novel, almost as if it were specifically designed to make the reader's mind wander, or levitate between the (semi-)abstract prose and unrelated thoughts spurred (or not) by portions of the text itself, although there aren't any puzzles here, mostly absences. The Runaway Soul seems to be a peak (though not zenith) of Proustian evolution that reaches something of a mental singularity (in the technological sense), thus leaving the reader behind. In this way the novel could be regarded as a nadir. But there are moments that evoked for me unnamable feelings and an actual skull-mental tingle similar to THC or maybe ASMR, and a couple more concrete than that, such as my father's hairbrush stubble against my adolescent cheek. Accidental symptoms of a failed masterpiece?
Brodkey repeatedly mentions the failure of conventional narrative forms and exercises to describe or relay reality, as with this bit of seeming sincerity: "What happened is hard to describe: nothing in life, especially voices and motives and actions, is as clear as it is in a narrative." If this is true, I am still not convinced that Brodkey has come up with a solution in this, his first and last novel. One should look to the works of Joseph McElroy for a better approximation of a solution. One of the most notable differences here is that, with McElroy, I am left puzzled in the sense of mental mystification, like a Lynch film, really. Whereas with The Runaway Soul I am left puzzled in the sense of slightly irritated confusion. In other words, there was plenty of potential, but it was circumnavigated and -scribed and ultimately abandoned. Such as Nonie's psychopathy, which most likely caused her to kill her infant brother, then her second infant brother. Or the barest of hints that S.L. molested his adopted son, Wiley (a notion that was indirectly confirmed in the life of the author).
And so we are left with something of an 835-page excursus, composed almost entirely of exposition sans concrete examples, scenes, and actions, which makes the exposition seem mostly meaningless and emotionless ('The War' chapter is the height of such inexplicable babble). Would it help to read Brodkey's earlier work, which is ostensibly a constant reshuffling of the same themes and characters, etc.? See here: https://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_06/baskin.html
All this might have been redeemed by a more evocative prose style, but it tends to be, on the whole, bland and repetitive, if not at times suspect of amateurism (if one didn't know better), such as the unselfconscious indulgence of adverbs: "...it is present phallically and cuntedly, present in actuality, not symbolically only." "fuckworthily" "...ex-Lutheranly and middle-classishly-during-the-war." It reads laughably uglily.
Salman Rushdie admired Brodkey's creation of portmanteaus. I don't think sticking a hyphen between words (where an 'and' could suffice) really counts. Which isn't to say that these hyphenated words in The Runaway Soul (a tic I often see in southern fiction) are not evocative at times, although rarely.
What I'm left with is disappointment, because the opening to the novel is as amazing as it is promising. Maybe that's the real reason Michael Silverblatt spent the first week or so re-reading the beginning and only the beginning of his copy of The Runaway Soul. Perhaps Silverblatt has a tinge of prophecy in his tendencies, as with the demonic babble and lightning-phobic shrieking of Nonie during a thunderstorm, heralding her death by fire in womanhood.
I'll leave you with a rare example of when the prose style tends to work: "The acerbic smoke, the cold tile, the faintly slide-y bathroom rug mean that I am here--in this order of factuality--and I pause, in the shadows: I am thin-bodied still, not as thin as at birth or when I was fourteen, but thin: the line of connection is recognizably present for me of some of my outward selves in other moments, ones that have occurred; and the longing--the anger at longing and the passionate wish not to long for things but to have them and to be at rest, ashore, asleep, in love, not in love, whatever--is a longing for an absolute, the single absolute thing, the sentence, the one statement, the word, the syllable, the breath of intention to speak in which the novel, this one, and the moments, and their reality, are encapsulated, are held as purely--well, as sensibly--as a seed in a cotyledon or as a baby in a womb or as my eye in its socket or as, supposedly, I am, in various theologies, held in the eye and mind of God."
P.S. Looking up 'cotyledon', I'm fairly sure that the anatomically correct phrase should be "as a cotyledon in a seed..." Can any botanist or horticulturist weigh in on this?
"...the mind wanders among puzzles; minds wander: it is what minds do." Also, true. Especially in the case of this (anti-)novel, almost as if it were specifically designed to make the reader's mind wander, or levitate between the (semi-)abstract prose and unrelated thoughts spurred (or not) by portions of the text itself, although there aren't any puzzles here, mostly absences. The Runaway Soul seems to be a peak (though not zenith) of Proustian evolution that reaches something of a mental singularity (in the technological sense), thus leaving the reader behind. In this way the novel could be regarded as a nadir. But there are moments that evoked for me unnamable feelings and an actual skull-mental tingle similar to THC or maybe ASMR, and a couple more concrete than that, such as my father's hairbrush stubble against my adolescent cheek. Accidental symptoms of a failed masterpiece?
Brodkey repeatedly mentions the failure of conventional narrative forms and exercises to describe or relay reality, as with this bit of seeming sincerity: "What happened is hard to describe: nothing in life, especially voices and motives and actions, is as clear as it is in a narrative." If this is true, I am still not convinced that Brodkey has come up with a solution in this, his first and last novel. One should look to the works of Joseph McElroy for a better approximation of a solution. One of the most notable differences here is that, with McElroy, I am left puzzled in the sense of mental mystification, like a Lynch film, really. Whereas with The Runaway Soul I am left puzzled in the sense of slightly irritated confusion. In other words, there was plenty of potential, but it was circumnavigated and -scribed and ultimately abandoned. Such as Nonie's psychopathy, which most likely caused her to kill her infant brother, then her second infant brother. Or the barest of hints that S.L. molested his adopted son, Wiley (a notion that was indirectly confirmed in the life of the author).
And so we are left with something of an 835-page excursus, composed almost entirely of exposition sans concrete examples, scenes, and actions, which makes the exposition seem mostly meaningless and emotionless ('The War' chapter is the height of such inexplicable babble). Would it help to read Brodkey's earlier work, which is ostensibly a constant reshuffling of the same themes and characters, etc.? See here: https://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_06/baskin.html
All this might have been redeemed by a more evocative prose style, but it tends to be, on the whole, bland and repetitive, if not at times suspect of amateurism (if one didn't know better), such as the unselfconscious indulgence of adverbs: "...it is present phallically and cuntedly, present in actuality, not symbolically only." "fuckworthily" "...ex-Lutheranly and middle-classishly-during-the-war." It reads laughably uglily.
Salman Rushdie admired Brodkey's creation of portmanteaus. I don't think sticking a hyphen between words (where an 'and' could suffice) really counts. Which isn't to say that these hyphenated words in The Runaway Soul (a tic I often see in southern fiction) are not evocative at times, although rarely.
What I'm left with is disappointment, because the opening to the novel is as amazing as it is promising. Maybe that's the real reason Michael Silverblatt spent the first week or so re-reading the beginning and only the beginning of his copy of The Runaway Soul. Perhaps Silverblatt has a tinge of prophecy in his tendencies, as with the demonic babble and lightning-phobic shrieking of Nonie during a thunderstorm, heralding her death by fire in womanhood.
I'll leave you with a rare example of when the prose style tends to work: "The acerbic smoke, the cold tile, the faintly slide-y bathroom rug mean that I am here--in this order of factuality--and I pause, in the shadows: I am thin-bodied still, not as thin as at birth or when I was fourteen, but thin: the line of connection is recognizably present for me of some of my outward selves in other moments, ones that have occurred; and the longing--the anger at longing and the passionate wish not to long for things but to have them and to be at rest, ashore, asleep, in love, not in love, whatever--is a longing for an absolute, the single absolute thing, the sentence, the one statement, the word, the syllable, the breath of intention to speak in which the novel, this one, and the moments, and their reality, are encapsulated, are held as purely--well, as sensibly--as a seed in a cotyledon or as a baby in a womb or as my eye in its socket or as, supposedly, I am, in various theologies, held in the eye and mind of God."
P.S. Looking up 'cotyledon', I'm fairly sure that the anatomically correct phrase should be "as a cotyledon in a seed..." Can any botanist or horticulturist weigh in on this?
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