His beard and hair are graying his eyes are the clearest of windows - alternately searing, frightened, warm, delighted. ('I am a sexual icon,' he jokes.) An occasional portrait subject for Richard Avedon, his face is elegantly long, as if it grew up between two city buildings. *At 55, Brodkey is genuinely handsome, ironically vain. And I'm afraid to publish the book for fear it will change the world around me too much for fear that it won't change anything at all.' You don't really want to do it, it's so painful. he has not published a single novel.īrodkey says his life's work, a massive Bildungsroman-in-progress titled 'A Party of Animals,' is 'more than 90 percent done,' but he will not release it quite yet into the public teeth - partly because the texture and breadth of his manuscript continues to evolve, partly because of the most affecting and naked sort of anxiety: 'It's like giving away a daughter in marriage. Some have even called him the greatest novelist alive.Īnd yet. Even here on the literary slopes of the Upper West Side, who has heard of Harold Brodkey? When he shops for lox at Barney Greengrass (the Sturgeon King), or when he takes a stroll past the unconscionable consumption on Columbus Avenue, does anyone recognize him - this tall, bearded man who may be America's Marcel Proust?įor years, a small clutch of writers and critics not ordinarily given to breathless adoration has compared Brodkey to Freud, Wordsworth and Whitman.

Harold brodkey innocence