SOURCE: Rubin, Merle. “Long-Awaited Novel Flatly Fails to Deliver.” Christian Science Monitor 84, no. 17 (18 December 1991): 13.

In the following review, Rubin asserts that “The Runaway Soul turns out to be as bad as the most pessimistic critic might have predicted.”

Reviewers seem to have been sharpening their knives in anticipation of the almost comically long-delayed debut of Harold Brodkey's first novel, which has finally been published after nearly 30 years of writing and revising. Brodkey was accorded the status of being an important writer working on a major novel for some three decades, with only two collections of short stories (one published in 1958, the other in 1988) to his credit. In a world where so many talented and productive writers have to struggle for recognition—or, in some cases, to be published at all—Brodkey's position as one of the anointed seemed to typify everything wrong with the New York literary establishment...