Anne's review
I'd recommend same to most--different book--but as anyone who's seen George Carlin's version of The Aristocrats can attest, there is poetry even in diarrhea, a poetry all the more remarkable for being previously unfound.
I know you like the perfect little short stories in First Love, and the Verona story, but the sweaty, unhinged, monomaniacal epics in this and in Almost Classical take on their own weight not only in performance but recursion round the nautilus, making not just the stories but life in general seem sloppy and unbounded and impossible and impossibly rich, which has been my own experience of it [life:].
Anyway, in its way, this book is my favorite of Brodkey's, the one I dip in and out of and clench my teeth and get jealous of--the same way you did in the passage where he imagined himself as his sister by trying to walk as if his chest were his ass.
Anne's review
I'd recommend same to most--different book--but as anyone who's seen George Carlin's version of The Aristocrats can attest, there is poetry even in diarrhea, a poetry all the more remarkable for being previously unfound.I know you like the perfect little short stories in First Love, and the Verona story, but the sweaty, unhinged, monomaniacal epics in this and in Almost Classical take on their own weight not only in performance but recursion round the nautilus, making not just the stories but life in general seem sloppy and unbounded and impossible and impossibly rich, which has been my own experience of it [life:].
Anyway, in its way, this book is my favorite of Brodkey's, the one I dip in and out of and clench my teeth and get jealous of--the same way you did in the passage where he imagined himself as his sister by trying to walk as if his chest were his ass.