Criticism
From the beginning of his career, Brodkey accrued detractors. Reviewing First Love for The Christian Science Monitor, Melvin Maddocks wrote that "a sense of vital, untampered-with conflict is missing. These stories seem too patly, too cautiously worked out. They are Japanese-garden fiction with every pebble in place.” A critic for The Atlantic Monthly similarly complained that Brodkey “appears to be the kind of artist committed to working in the minor key which The New Yorker has made fashionable.”
Kirkus Reviews called Stories in an Almost Classical Mode an "endless kvetch." In The New Criterion, Bruce Bawer found the book's tone to be "extraordinarily arrogant and self-obsessed." He further wrote, “Brodkey is so fixated upon the tragic memories of his childhood and youth that he has virtually no sense of proportion about them. In one story after another, he offers up pages of gratuitous detail, straining, it seems, to squeeze every last drop of significance out of every last inane particular.” Later, in assessing The Runaway Soul, Bawer wrote, “The plain fact is that 99 percent of the prose here is gawky, aimless, repetitive, murky, and pretentious—and there are few more unenviable literary experiences than having to read over eight hundred pages of it.” He concluded that the novel was "one of the literary fiascos of all time."
“Entering The Runaway Soul,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times, “is like arriving at a monthlong house party and being accosted at the door by your host, who sticks his mouth in your face and begins to talk.” Lehmann-Haupt found the book to be replete with “bogus philosophizing” and “paradoxical non-art," with prose that was "verbose, repetitive, overstuffed with adverbs, of questionable sense, tedious and just plain ugly".
Regarding The Wild Darkness, Brenda Bracker in The Baltimore Sun criticized the “long and self-indulgent stretches of the author’s much-touted mystical prose” and wrote that “watching Brodkey watch himself die by inches becomes, ultimately, tedious.”
Read more about this topic: Harold Brodkey
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“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)