Brodkey in the Wilderness

Harold Brodkey's "This Wild Darkness" found me at last, after many years of my successful ducking. It was at Mercer Street Books, my second-to-last day back in New York. I was following my own rule of used bookstore browsing—"what catches the eye." My eyes and the rest of me got caught. I'd been thinking this was going to be my last time in the US for a good long while. There had been a lot of farewells, a lot of endings, so many that I couldn't even make myself travel to Toronto for my old friend Tom Bolt's memorial service that weekend: Memorial Day weekend—it turned out—an American travesty of a holiday that was now living up to its name; travel was anyway impossibly demanding, expensive, fraught with delay and dysfunction and the flatulence of authoritarianism. So I was poking around good old haunts instead. I like to think Tom—who fell to a brain tumor back in January—would have approved, and I tell him I'll be writing about him soon. At that moment, there was too much elegy, so much around me was crying out to be mourned.