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“... of Myself’, its 800 pages of first-person narrative are formless, plotless and graceless. Harold Brodkey, who began his career in the New Yorker in the Fifties, has been slowly maturing not a well-tempered masterpiece but the garrulous, profligate self-celebrations of a precocious adolescent who never grew up. It is not even clear why the novel ...”

“... Harold Brodkey, whose debut collection of stories, First Love and Other Sorrows, was greeted with well-deserved acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic when it appeared in1958, has produced a hefty new collection: Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. During the intervening thirty years his reputation, bolstered by occasional stories in the New Yorker and other glossy American magazines, has grown formidable ...”

“... There is another accent, that goes to Harvard, That anyone who does can have. My babysitter Harold Brodkey will. One day I, too, I will. The servants dip their fingers in The blood and paint themselves, and smear each other’s blouses, With all the time in the world apparently until it’s time. It’s time To pass the chalice and drink. They ...”

“... is a black hole, these possibilities remain all the closer to the page for not being entertained. Harold Brodkey died of Aids in January 1996; Oscar Moore died in September 1996. Brodkey wrote about his illness for the New Yorker; Moore for the Guardian. Obviously, when they wrote their articles neither of them knew ...”

“... One of the early chapters in Harold Brodkey’s first novel The Runaway Soul is entitled ‘The River’. The narrator, after his father’s death, returns to a landscape which he had known in early childhood. Some of the prose is plain and clear: ‘At the mouth of the stream, where it emptied into the inlet, under willows, lay a very large, ungainly river dinghy ...”

“... after revision. It is dense and allusive, and pretty massive in scope and ambition. Pinckney, like Harold Brodkey before him, is a contemporary writer who writes, not directly of and to the contemporary world, but with one eye cocked backwards to the golden days of the Modernist novel in English, and the other wandering forward some years hence towards ...”

“... to bodge and skimp: you have to believe that this, after all, will do. If you don’t, you’re Harold Brodkey. If you still believe that writers work hard, go and live with one for a week, and the next time they’re whining about their sad and difficult lives pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge while having another coffee break and trying ...”

“... persuasive: we watch his best ideas and pet projects being blocked by his once encouraging boss, Harold Stone, and we see him being sweet-talked into the idea over lunch by a charismatic author, Victor Propp (Harold Brodkey-like, he has been writing a massive novel for the last twenty years, with the help of steadily ...”

“... it, how lively most of the book is, and how funny, too. Mars-Jones is challenging us, rather as Harold Brodkey did in his enormous, microscopically narcissistic novel, The Runaway Soul, to keep up with the book’s massive deceleration. Unlike Brodkey, Mars-Jones is witty. So the novel displays an amusing ...”

“... artists’ – among them Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, John Ashbery, Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Sontag, Harold Brodkey and Robert Wilson – who kept their sexuality hidden from public view, something White views with antipathy: ‘We openly gay artists had to deal with the dismissive or condescending judgments all around us – “Of course since I’m not ...”

“... playing fast and loose with the fingerpointing. It’s the sort of show-offy, loose-logic passage Harold Ross would have shot down by flagging with question marks signifying ‘Huh?’ Why, for example, is there no sheet on that adulterous bed? Isn’t it precisely the memory of one’s spouse that gives adultery its dirty kick? (In a poem called ...”

“... proud (I’m thinking of Edmund White’s complaints about ‘blue-chip gays’ like Sontag and Harold Brodkey; with Vidal, he had a whole other slate of indictments). The future may look upon the closet-clingers more benignly, or at least more apathetically, as the labels of sexual identity peel away like old bumper stickers and we evolve into a ...”