SOURCE: Curran, Ronald T. Review of This Wild Darkness. World Literature Today 72, no. 1 (winter 1998): 145-46.

In the following review, Curran considers Brodkey's unflinching and unsentimental exploration of his struggle with AIDS in This Wild Darkness.

“Being ill like this combines shock—this time I will die—with a pain and agony that are unfamiliar, that wrench me out of myself. It is like visiting one's funeral, like visiting loss in its purest and most monumental form, this wild darkness, which is not only unknown but which one cannot enter as oneself. No one belongs entirely to nature, to time: identity was a game. … At times I cannot entirely believe I ever was alive, that I ever was another self, and wrote and loved or failed to love. I do not really understand this erasure. … But this inability to have an identity in the face of death—I don't...