A hefty volume of his short stories from the last twenty-five years, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, 1 has recently been published, along with a reissue of his stories from the 50’s, First Love and Other Sorrows, 2 making such an assessment possible. If his achievement falls short of the master status ascribed to him by the likes of Harold Bloom, Denis Donoghue, and Gordon Lish, it is nevertheless substantial enough to prompt serious if qualified admiration. Add to this the image of a self-centered self-promoter, and a figure emerges who seems to epitomize everything inflated, false, and cliquish about literary politics.īut Brodkey cannot be dismissed so easily. Touted as a literary genius on the basis of a perennially unfinished novel and a handful of difficult-to-read New Yorker stories about his own traumatic childhood, he has been pushed down our throats like some obnoxious older cousin who has inexplicably garnered the admiration of the family elders. Harold Brodkey is the kind of writer a critic loves to hate.
