Perhaps it is inevitable that from time to time it should degenerate into bombast, as defined by Coleridge: ''thoughts and images too great for the subject.'' This, for example, aboutĪ remembered father: ''His face. The prose, then, is a prose of painful abundance. Brodkey is willing to put out, with the same calculated heroism, even in a story about two adolescent boys fooling about on their bicycles.

On and on and on, his prose glistening with the effort of bringing you to climax. The point of the tale is not to be erotic but to show that, like his narrator, this writer can go

Brodkey is a pornographer his performance, and his hero's, are an exhausting ordeal for all concerned, including the reader. It would be quite wrong to give the impression that I have just picked a sentence at random and counted 130 words, a sentence as reluctant to stop as the boy's sister, and, like her, not so much ending as collapsing.Įven more extraordinary, and - perhaps strangely, considering the subject - almost as painful, is the last section of a four-part story called ''Innocence.'' The story is about a Radcliffe princess called Orra, and Part Four, whichĪgain runs to around 10,000 words, describes how a young man forces the reluctant Orra to achieve orgasm by what must surely be the longest act of cunnilingus in literary history. He likes (though that hardly seems the right word) to write virtually interminable sentences - as if a period would bring the reader unearned relief from the mimetic Of the child's situation is reflected in Mr. In this tale the torment is apparently endless.

Juvenile torture comes up elsewhere in the book from time to time, but more or less intermittently. One of the more appalling of these stories is called ''The Pain Continuum.'' About 10,000 words long, it is a fantastically detailedĪccount by a little boy of the tortures inflicted on him by his stepsister. Brodkey's most striking characteristic is his passion for what I can only call protraction. stories important as evidence of the scope and nature of this writer's gifts, which are certainly remarkable, though often a cause of pain to the reader. No doubt it is to these stories that Harold Brodkey owes his considerable reputation but there is in ''Stories in an Almost Classical Mode'' fiction that one can hardly imagine finding in The New Yorker They were written over the last 25 years, and mostly appeared in the admirably accommodating New Yorker Some of the stories in this huge book are short, some are long enough to be called novellas, but all are from the same intense and dedicated mind. STORIES IN AN ALMOST CLASSICAL MODE By Harold Brodkey. Section 7, Column 1 Book Review Deskīy FRANK KERMODE Frank Kermode is a literary critic whose most recent book is ''History and Value.'' September 18, 1988, Sunday, Late City Final Edition

Innocence harold brodkey book