Hence the plot, such as it is, of “The Runaway Soul” reprises data from “Stories in an Almost Classical Mode,” adding here, subtracting there. Like his avowed model Proust, anything that skirts his consciousness, no matter how trivial-seeming, is fair game for Brodkey. “My mind, besides remembering itself, remembers other minds and bans the world.” It could be that Wiley’s creator, Brodkey, did not want to seem to validate homosexuality in our time of AIDS and uncharitable social attitudes toward male homosexuality. Why would Wiley’s otherwise ravenous memory be skittish about recounting one of the rare exchanges where he experiences pleasure without the meddling of his mind? Certainly it goes against the inclusive narrative logic of the novel. The oddity is that rather than detailing the, for Wiley, pleasurable sexuality, Brodkey expends nearly all of his prose on the coy preliminaries: flirtatious patter, horseplay. At numerous junctures in the novel, Wiley refers to young men with whom he’s had affairs, and two of these are conveyed: the first with Wiley’s older cousin by adoption, the second with a teenage friend. There is another reason for the singular lack of pleasure in these encounters, which is that Wiley’s deepest carnal impulses appear homosexual. After one typical sexual session, Wiley, exasperated, muses: “Let me say something, let me feel something, utterly and singly and simply true.” But why aren’t any of these pages erotic? Mostly because Wiley’s niggling, hyperactive brain will not let him alone.
Though orgasm is no longer a problem for Ora, the sexuality is still compulsive rather than erotic, several hundred pages worth while Wiley’s voluminous, minute recording of it is all-consuming, obsessive. Brodkey even resuscitates the flashy metaphor, which in the novel reads: “To see her at the dinner table was to see Marxism die.” As promised, Ora, who has lost a consonant, and Wiley, whose surname is now Silenowicz, are sexually grappling all over again. In 1988, it was reprinted in Brodkey’s second collection, “Stories in an Almost Classical Mode.” And now nearly 20 years after the first publication of “Innocence,” the ample, autobiographical novel, called “The Runaway Soul,” has arrived at last. Given our current climate of gender equality and “political correctness,” the subject of “Innocence” would not seem a promising one for contemporary readers.
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