Sea Battles is filled with whoppers: misstatements, overstatements, nonstatements and statements that are silly, false or incomprehensible. When he is bad, he is very, very bad, and he is very, very bad quite often.

In “At Christmas,” he catalogues the “degrees of hope and kinds of style and moral and immoral intention” of his fellow travelers underground, not to mention their very cool hair: “full and bushy, strict and skimpy, waves, curls, fluff, and dreadlocks, pompadours, bangs, straightforward falls, braided falls.” He pauses to praise famous men: One beggar, he notes, is “terrifying in the sorrow of all that he had been excluded from and all that his life included.” And in the end, he records a kind of moral victory, as passengers throughout his subway car give up their seats, inexplicably, for a “strange-looking,” package-laden group of black and Hispanic parents and their children: “In silent agreement of a sort … the crowd … expressed a social opinion.… It was the oddest, damnedest, most piercing event.”Īlas, Brodkey is not always this good. Brodkey has sometimes been compared to Marcel Proust and Walt Whitman, but here he reminds me of the late Janet Flanner, The New Yorker ‘s brilliant Paris correspondent for five decades, who understood that fashions and food could tell you as much–indeed, perhaps more–about the spirit of that city than all of Charles de Gaulle’s speeches and a year’s worth of Le Monde combined.īrodkey knew the nervous intimacy that defines New York’s public spaces. “The Subway at Christmas” was originally published as a “Talk of the Town” item in The New Yorker, and it is not only beautiful–with its observations of “the gloomy, heartbroken half-light in the cavern at the edge of the dry riverbed of tracks”–but trenchant, too, in its understanding of how class and social tensions emerge in the tiniest details of dress and the most insignificant gestures. One of the best pieces here is also among the slightest. If, for some reason, you consider yourself a New York intellectual, Sea Battles on Dry Land might encourage you to secede from the tribe. Whatever the subject, Brodkey’s essays are wildly uneven he ranges from fiercely incisive to laughably pretentious. But from the evidence of Sea Battles on Dry Land, an eclectic collection of Brodkey’s essays, it was New York City and literature–not eros and thanatos–that Brodkey knew best.

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