I had only read Brodkey's collection, Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, probably a dozen years ago, and admired his writing. This is necessarily a very dark book, an examination of his last years and months after he learns he has AIDS. It sounds incongruous, I suppose, to say I felt a kinship with Brodkey, but I did, and it was mostly because of this statement - "I am an addict of language, of storytelling and of journalism. I read, not frenziedly anymore, but constantly. I long to love other people's words, other people for their words, their ideas." Well I am not terminally ill, as Brodkey knew he was when he wrote those words, but I knew what he meant. The importance of life: our lives, other people's lives; and the stories from those lives are equally important, to preserve those lives. Brodkey continued to feel this way right up to the end, as evidenced in one of the final entries in This Wild Darkness - "And I am still writing, as you see. I am practicing making entries in my journal, recording my passage into nonexistence. This identity, this mind, this particular cast of speech, is nearly over." This was not, of course, a happy book, but it is an important one from a very talented writer. - Tim Bazzett, author of Love, War & Polio ( )

Rating: 2.5* of five

The Publisher Says: It is possible not to care for Harold Brodkey's obsessive, digressive, almost plotless fiction and still be moved by this memoir of his last sufferings until his death, in mid-1996, of AIDS. Brodkey was a writer for whom style was everything, but in his own implacable and untimely mortality he found a subject before which style was nothing. In this assemblage of essays, journal entries, and brief notes, he confronts his illness from a clinical perspective without losing his ironic tone or his genius for minutiae. In a sense, Brodkey wrote nothing but autobiography throughout his career; this, then, is a fitting final chapter.

My Review: Fabulous language, gorgeous emotional honesty, and why in the end do I care so little? His wife seems to me a woman who made a bad bargain and stuck with it; he seems self aware and unblinkingly honest about his fate, but some essential something that would give this book its heart wasn't put into it. I suppose it could be the supre-tight focus on Brodkey's death and death alone that makes me feel somehow bereft of personal feeling. Perhaps I feel slightly uninterested because I know so little of the man himself before the illness. I can't really be certain, since my editorial sense deserted me as I read this book. I fell into a fogged unwillingness to read or stop reading, a very unusual state for me. A very strange book.


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