Sea Battles on Dry Land: Essays - Hardcover

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, long wait. Sea Battles on Dry Land is a posthumously published collection of essays, many culled from the pages of the New 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 Rivers greeted us") 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 Land is 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

Harold Brodkey was the author of three short story collections, including The World Is the Home of Love and Death (Metropolitan/Owl Books, 0-8050-5999-7), two novels, a memoir, and the extended meditAtion, My Venice (Metropolitan Books, 0-8050- 4833-2).