Harold Brodkey is usually the chronicler of a personal and serious form of modern memory. His efforts are direct and, save for one or two exceptions, unambiguous: his fiction details the lives and losses of the American generations who survived World War II, to which he adds particularly recorded personal memories of childhood, growth, and maturity. The main publisher of his short fiction has been the New Yorker, which printed all but one of the stories in his first collection, First Love and Other Sorrows (1957), and ten of the eighteen pieces collected in Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988).

Brodkey's idiom and innovation are distinctly American. However, he escapes any confinement of influence either from his native land or from abroad. For example, the comparison made by some critics between Brodkey and Marcel Proust is adventitious. Nonetheless, biographical details are not incidental for Brodkey. They form, rather, the...