The Runaway Soul (FSG Classics)

Adopted as a child in the early 1930s, Wiley Silenowicz is raised in the St. Louis household of his cousins S.L. and Lila and their daughter, Nonie. Wiley's mind is lightning quick and obsessively ruminative as he meditates on his adoptive mother's overpowering nature and his adoptive father's seductiveness, on his adoptive sister's pathological jealousy and his own mystical yearnings. Released from the violent affections of his youth into college and adulthood, he tests the permutations of sexuality in a ceaseless quest for love. An epic adventure in consciousness that was thirty years in the writing and that caps Harold Brodkey's astonishing career as a short-story writer, The Runaway Soul is the great statement of Brodkey's vocation, and it has the rare power to change a reader's understanding of both self and world.