SOURCE: French, Sean. “Scientific Fiction.” New Statesman & Society 2, no. 70 (6 October 1989): 44.

In the following review, French offers a laudatory assessment of The Abundant Dreamer.

Harold Brodkey has an extraordinary, almost subterranean, reputation among a small group of readers and critics in the United States. This seems strange at first because, though Brodkey must now be in his fifties, his reputation is based on a virtual handful of short stories as well as the rumours about a novel that Brodkey has been working on for many years.

Furthermore, the subject matter of this, Brodkey's second collection of stories [The Abundant Dreamer], is the standard fare of modern American short fiction, especially that which appears in the New Yorker: the love affairs and family relationships of wealthy, East Coast, highly educated, often Jewish people.

Also, like his fellow New Yorker contributor, John Updike, Brodkey is little interested in matters of form...