Profane Friendship

Rating:
Summary: Novels rarely achieve this emotional authenticity
Review: Generalising, the typical novel fits its action into a wide, undetailed character arc - neat but hardly lifelike.

Profane Frienship takes the opposite approach. Knowing interaction between two people is so changeable within a short time - a run of actions, reactions, reaction, reaction; ending only when people separate - Brodkey focuses on the moment-to-moment details of contact and lets the broader plot arc take care of itself.

As it does in real life. This novel's originality results from its intrusive depth; few other books maintain such intense focus on the undercurrents present in even the most glancing contact between friends - especially teenagers.

For most writers, achieving such emotional reality would be enough. But after dissecting young friendship, fights - the low-level continuous conflict I remember as essential to my adolescence but rarely see reflected in books - Brodkey then tops off his novel with a final adult section, where his now late-middle-aged characters present the most authentic description of the experience of making films I've read.

This is a really terrific, masterful novel - a distillation of the entire life of a highly intelligent, curious, unforgiving and sentimental man with close-to-photographic recall.
Rating:
Summary: Great descriptions, but not for everyone
Review: The descriptions of life in Venice are marvelous, and this book is a major achievement, but Brodkey's homosexual eroticism fall flat for readers not turned on by male/male sexuality. I don't mean that to be a "heterosexist" comment, but only that I was hoping to like this book better than I did because I love Venice and love novels that evoke its atmosphere. This book certainly does that, but when it goes on about one man's obsession with his male lover it leaves me longing for a stronger female presence.

Rating:
Summary: Sacred Possession
Review: There are few books that enable you to discover yourself through the revelation and reflection of others thoughts and feelings, but Profane Friendship is a rare exception. The canals of venice become like the vessels in ones brain - the colour and vision created by lyrical text painting colours so vivid that they enter consciosness, half realised but fully consumed. The novel pulls no punches yet reaches and tickles its reader with a knowingness with which you have to marvel. Love,place (Venice) and memory are woven to create a superb patern.