Opener “State of Grace” serves as an overture to the collection, introducing a family that will be transposed throughout the tales. The first few stories in the collection are told from the first-person perspective of an adolescent, likely an iteration of Brodkey himself. First Love is very much a novel-in-stories, with recurring characters, themes, and motifs. Brodkey’s stories document the strange little bubble of time between WWII and the turmoil of the sixties, and his writing, a kind of late modernism, reflects this period, when the ideal of the American Dream began to be redefined in terms of new modes of class and education. Although discrete entities, the stories function together. The stories collected in Harold Brodkey’s First Love and Other Sorrows, both inspiriting and crushing, are some of the most psychologically true pieces of fiction I’ve ever read.įirst Love collects nine stories, all composed and published in the 1950s all but one was originally published in The New Yorker. ![]() Great literature happens in the arrangement of that data, by presenting details with the right ear and eye for truth-and also, the good sense to know what to withhold from the audience, who, after all, are a part of the equation. We can find facts anywhere, but details and data are not the same as art. ![]() One way to measure how great a work of literature is might be to ask how true (or “True,” if one is feeling particularly romantic) the writing is.
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