PROFANE FRIENDSHIP

An exploration of love that slides tissues of earthly friendship and love under the Brodkey microscope and finds the cell walls of the human soul. In 1993, Brodkey announced in The New Yorker that he has AIDS. As in The Runaway Soul (1991), Brodkey deals in shadings, quarter tones, nuances, and half-gestures that plant a raw reality on the page, a Nowness, that stops time and fixes each slice of feeling into a still-life in painterly words. Patches arise that are often as hard to grasp as Henry James's late style, the reader's brain a sieve through which pass drenches of sensation, coloring thoughts without actually forming them. Setting his story in Venice, Brodkey conjures up the city in ravishing descriptions, ever coming up with immensely striking sentences amid his more remote effects: ``One desires a naked world of love to replace the one of lonely dailiness, a world which has a heat of emotion and genital heat, and such warm, shocked brightness spreading through it that it might as well be Hell.'' We follow the birth of love in Niles O'Hara, son of a best-selling novelist who lives in prewar Venice and is a friend of Hemingway's; birth of family love and adoration of his nursemaid Zilda, and then of his love for fellow student Onni Galliani, which revives after the war when the O'Haras (minus Dad) return to Venice; birth of love as male sex play and profane friendship with Onni; love becoming love/hate as Onni turns into a monster, and later into a dead soul as a world-famous actor who envies Niles his life as a writer. At story's end, after a glorious picture of bustling street life in Venice, Niles says, ``I regret the disappearance of my life.'' Spirited originality that will take time to sink in.