The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The World Is the Home of Love and Death by Harold Brodkey
Irving Malin

Harold Brodkey. The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Metropolitan, 1997. 312 pp. $25.00.

Although some critics dislike Brodkey’s texts because their style is convoluted, narcissistic, and “imitative”—I think of Proust and James—they do not recognize that he bravely attempts to capture the power of consciousness (or the consciousness of power). He wants to bully us—the first story is appropriately entitled “The Bullies”—and indeed to seduce us.
“Waking” is surely the best story in this collection. It is, perhaps, one of the best stories written by an American since World War II. It violates the norms of family life, the easy role playing we learn to survive. It uncannily demonstrates the wild darkness of Brodkey’s art. “Waking” is an exploration of the painful relationship of son and mother, of “slave” and “master.” It alerts us to the blurring of boundaries. It is a trancelike presentation of complicit incest. The narrator returns to the primal scene: his mother, Lila, and her inability to care for him—to clean his dirtied body. He realizes, as an adult, that he may be misreading the past. Throughout the text the pronouns are transformed: “I” turns into “he” and, without doubt, “she.” (The transgression of “male” and “female” is an obsession of Brodkey’s.) The sentences move slowly, tentatively, seductively as do the actions of infant and mother. Here is a representative sentence: “She holds me; she holds me by the shoulders and turns me and lowers me—she is going to stand me and prop me on the edge of the tub—and it is as if her arms were slow, straining wings, my wings.” The infant is shaped by his mother-lover to reach angelic bliss. Even as the adult narrator remembers the terrifying embrace of ritual, he tries to relive it again and again. But his consciousness overwhelms him: “This local reality half shared—that is to say, judged and fixed as something other than private hallucination by my mother’s being here—becomes strangely blank, elegant in a way, stripped of particularities, and close to a proud madness of making things into a theater of meaning.” The common realities—waking, washing, speaking—are the “theater of meaning.” And the theater compels the narrator to recognize that his life, his art, is perversely beautiful and painful. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The World Is the Home of Love and Death by Harold Brodkey Irving Malin Harold Brodkey. The World Is the Home of Love and Death. Metropolitan, 1997. 312 pp. $25.00. Although some critics dislike Brodkey’s texts because their style is convoluted, narcissistic, and “imitative”—I think of Proust and James—they do not recognize that he bravely attempts to capture the power of consciousness (or the consciousness of power). He wants to bully us—the first story is appropriately entitled “The Bullies”—and indeed to seduce us. “Waking” is surely the best story in this collection. It is, perhaps, one of the best stories written by an American since World War II. It violates the norms of family life, the easy role playing we learn to survive. It uncannily demonstrates the wild darkness of Brodkey’s art. “Waking” is an exploration of the painful relationship of son and mother, of “slave” and “master.” It alerts us to the blurring of boundaries. It is a trancelike presentation of complicit incest. The narrator returns to the primal scene: his mother, Lila, and her inability to care for him—to clean his dirtied body. He realizes, as an adult, that he may be misreading the past. Throughout the text the pronouns are transformed: “I” turns into “he” and, without doubt, “she.” (The transgression of “male” and “female” is an obsession of Brodkey’s.) The sentences move slowly, tentatively, seductively as do the actions of infant and mother. Here is a representative sentence: “She holds me; she holds me by the shoulders and turns me and lowers me—she is going to stand me and prop me on the edge of the tub—and it is as if her arms were slow, straining wings, my wings.” The infant is shaped by his mother-lover to reach angelic bliss. Even as the adult narrator remembers the terrifying embrace of ritual, he tries to relive it again and again. But his consciousness overwhelms him: “This local reality half shared—that is to say, judged and fixed as something other than private hallucination by my mother’s being here—becomes strangely blank, elegant in a way, stripped of particularities, and close to a proud madness of making things into a theater of meaning.” The common realities—waking, washing, speaking—are the “theater of meaning.” And the theater compels the narrator to recognize that his life, his art, is perversely beautiful and painful. [Irving Malin]

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