SOURCE: Cahill, Christopher. Review of This Wild Darkness. America 177, no. 6 (13 September 1997): 35-37.

In the following mixed review, Cahill asserts that This Wild Darkness “is less difficult than Brodkey's other works, and though it is not his best book it is his most approachable.”

We won't have Harold Brodkey to kick around anymore. This he makes clear in his first posthumous book, This Wild Darkness: The Story of My Death, a series of brilliant, inane, self-absorbed, self-reflective essays and ramblings first published in The New Yorker as he died from complications due to AIDS. Included in the jumble are assorted theories, ranging from love (“My measure of it is that I should have died to spare her”) to the Midwestern origins of the yellow brick road.

During their serial appearances, these writings, now shorn of their more corrosively personal bits of gossip and opinion, had the fascination of a...