SOURCE: Adams, Robert M. “A Good Minestrone.” New York Review of Books 38, no. 19 (21 November 1991): 3-5.

In the following positive review, Adams provides a stylistic examination of Brodkey's The Runaway Soul.

Harold Brodkey's big book The Runaway Soul appears before us trailing a long prepublication history, many high commendations, and a counterfoil of questioning if not derogatory comments. Associated and overlapping materials have already been published in two collections of short stories (First Love and Other Sorrows, 1958, and Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, 1989). There has also been an extraordinary amount of gossip and opinionated talk about the author's career, much of it provoked by Brodkey's own personality, some of it inspired by the special reach of his literary ambition, even more of it centering on the prolonged and apparently turbulent process of editorial consideration and reconsideration, which has now resulted in a first, but monumental, novel by an...