**Harold Brodkey’s acclaimed novel is a mesmerizing work of literary genius, exploring the momentous events in the life of a family in twentieth-century St. Louis, and a writer still haunted by a childhood tragedy **

First published in 1991, *The Runaway Soul* took Harold Brodkey more than three decades to complete. This sprawling novel has since been eagerly embraced by readers and critics alike, earning Brodkey the epithet of an “American Proust.” Told by Wiley Silenowicz, Brodkey’s fictional alter ego, the story snakes back and forth across the unforgettable events of a life. Following the traumatic death of his mother, Wiley recalls his troubling childhood in the care of his cousins: smooth-talking S. L. Silenowicz, his beautiful, emotionally deficient wife, Lila, and their abusive daughter, Nonie, who torments Wiley to no end.

In language that soars and hypnotizes, *The Runaway Soul *fearlessly explores youth and adulthood, love and loss, sex and death, marriage and family, tracing upon one man’s odyssey through a troubling world. More than two decades after it first appeared in print, Harold Brodkey’s magnum opus remains one of the finest literary works produced by an American novelist in the twentieth century.

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### From Publishers Weekly

Exquisitely sensitive and introspective narrator Wiley Silenowicz looks back over a painful childhood and youth in this sometimes brilliant, but more often turgid and self-indulgent novel.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

### From Library Journal

The most famous unpublished work in America, Brodkey's eagerly anticipated novel has finally arrived--dense, ambitious, and over 800 pages long. Its hero is Wiley Silenowicz, adopted in 1930 and raised by his cousins S.L. and Lila Silenowicz in St. Louis. Not quite as crafty as his name, but possessed of a fiercely observant intelligence that unfolds experience endlessly like a flower, Wiley must abide a glamorous, self-absorbed mother, an obnoxious sister, and a smooth-talking father who says things like, "I won't wear another man's shoes . . . but I'll tell another man's jokes. . . . I'm the father to another man's child." In the course of the novel, Wiley grows up, observes his parents, suffers his sister, experiences sexual longing and then sex. In short, nothing much happens except language--Brodkey's lush, carefully observed antidote to minimalism that will alternately enthrall and exasperate readers. The result? Brilliant, maddening, and essential for readers of good literature everywhere. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 7/91.
*- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"*
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.