An audacious behemoth, a veritable leviathan of a work, certainly a book you could never recommend to anyone, doing so would be like off-loading a puppy or a plant or a reptile or a disabled child to someone, you’re palming off an incredible time sink, an excursion up to Everest in a seemingly innocuous 835 pages. You have to schedule this book in, you’re an analyst sitting down with a pipe in your mouth listening to this man bloviate about his entire history, mapping it out in excruciating detail, as you unwittingly become ingrained into his syntax, into his laws, in fact merging and moving towards an almost complete absorption by him, sinking into his panoramic contemplations, subsumed by this alien consciousness which takes page after page to become synchronised with - up until the metamorphosis culminates and all of a sudden becomes complete.

Brodkey has achieved something marvellous by being able to maintain such a precarious state of vertigo for this many pages, the edifice of his life standing like a mountain range laying for miles around, insuperable. The Runaway Soul is a book of dizziness, of arcane and archaic speech, of minute facial gestures and tautly examined motives. It is infantile, pretentious, and wholly autistic, but it is a magnificent achievement, as taxing as all taxonomies must be - by necessity.

There is a glib sentiment I’ve heard proffered in many different places, and attributed to (at least according to my hasty google search), of all people, Stephenie Meyer (that genius of prose). It’s the platitude that we live many lives by reading many books, that we achieve some kind of transcendence via a kaleidoscopic glimpse into the lives of others by the act of reading itself. The issue is that these lives, in a great deal of novels and fiction you will read at least, are hastily conjured-up, regurgitated, and essentially artificial fabrication of real lives - they can be beautiful, you can be charmed by them, you can even be disgusted by them, and if the writer is of a high enough calibre you may even be so incredulous (or perhaps generous enough) to call their portrayals realistic, making the huge gambit that they in some way manage to shore up to the infinite complexity of a single lived moment. But surely the intensity of a single life, displayed in its harrowing minutiae and triviality, trumps such shallowness? Brodkey’s book seems to pole vault across this hurdle, this giant obstacle concerning the sheer complexity of character and biography, and allows you to be consumed, thrown as you are into its quixotic quotidian reflection of mid century Midwestern existence - his answer is a howling yes, an affirmation of the achingly singular and particular, a great globule of phlegm in the face of the idea of easily-digestible 'characters'.

Brodkey’s prose is in a sense incomprehensible, his references and dialect and mental associations are nigh on inaccessible to a reader from the modern day. An alterior mind chugs and churns before you, in all of its failures and manifest (and exhibited with masochistic pleasure at every opportunity, mind you) maladaptions, in all of its interrupted flows, in its pain and paltry pleasures. Brodkey’s individuality and experience comes to the fore with a searing effect of reality - a light too bright to be looked at, an intelligence both boundless and tedious that must be contended with (that is, if you have the sheer stamina to follow his densely-thicketed trains of thought).

I mean, do you want to talk about one of the great auteurs of the 20th century? My God. I don’t know if I loved it, but I stand before it amazed, it is an exercise of architectonics applied to the puzzle of fiction, an infinite labyrinthine jungle gym of a confessional. Don’t read it, it’s that good. I don’t know if I truly understood it all, maybe that by itself is of some minor significance, and maybe it is a positive that I didn’t. It spurns me to write and to speak of it in glowing terms, and to gush over it when speaking to friends, so that's probably a good sign that I thoroughly enjoyed it, even if I'm a little too close to this ordeal to say that I cherished it or would ever wish it on another. Taken as a whole, it’s too much - but then again, maybe it’s just enough.

(It’s funny to note that I never found an album to listen to in conjunction with this book, something that rarely ever happens. Brodkey is his own idiosyncratic composition, and no amount of John Fahey or Toumani Diabaté was able to change that fact. Oh yeah, and I’ve been reading this since fucking January/February (I’m writing this in October) - the eight month slog that this tome took out of me should hopefully be indicative of its brutally solipsistic density. Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick are a drop in Runaway Soul's ocean when it comes to the dedication and discipline required to get to its last page. Good luck!!) ( )