Sea Battles on Dry Land: Essays
The late Harold Brodkey made headlines in 1991 upon publication of  his 835-page, 27-years-in-the-making epic novel,The Runaway Soul; fortunately for his fans, he'd been turning out enough short stories, journalism, and essays in the interim to mitigate the long,longwait.Sea Battles on Dry Landis a posthumously published collection of  essays, many culled from the pages of theNew Yorker, that cover such diverse topics as Woody Allen's romantic and legal woes, weather, the AIDS epidemic in New York, and the author's recollections of Frank O'Hara. Divided into sections titled "Celebrity and Politics;" "Wit and Whimsy;" "Life, Love and Sex;" and "Language and Literature," Brodkey's essays, like their subject matter, are a mixed bag ranging from the genuinely insightful to the egregiously self-serving. In "The Roar of the Canon" Brodkey brings considerable critical acumen to his discussion of John O'Hara, pointing out:He did not work in the form in the ways that Fitzgerald and Hemingway did. He did not pursue any would-be essential social truth or analysis of community in his novels, as Dreiser and Faulkner did in theirs. Perhaps O'Hara knew his own fragility: Hemingway ended a suicide, after all. Perhaps O'Hara gambled ineptly but not suicidally: he stayed in the popular-serious mainstream.What's more, the writing here is incisive, elegant, and refreshingly free of the kind of excesses on exhibit in a preceding essay, "Frank and Harold," a queasy mix of starstruck name-dropping ("We entered the Village like the Jews into Canaan. Frank and Ashbery and Larry Riversgreetedus") and tedious recollections of long-past sophomoric conversations ("Frank shouted that surrealism was dead. John or Frank shouted that the entire surface of the canvas mattered. John, I think, said that Auden had loosened the girdle of form").Sea Battles on Dry Landis proof--if we needed it--that when he was good, Brodkey was very, very good, but when he was bad, he was purple.--Alix Wilber