""Puberty"" picks up this obsession with bodily change, and includes not only the exact size of the narrator's member, but a description of his first group masturbation at Boy Scout camp. The remaining 400 or so pages focus on, and are mostly told by, Wiley Silenowicz, who also appears under other names, including ""Harold Brodkey."" ""Innocence"" and ""Play,"" two shorter pieces, are both tedious, ironically titled meditations-one describing a marathon bout of sex, and the other the narrator's first erection and ejaculation. Their subject-matter-a Jew among Gentiles, the relations of children to parents, adult love affairs, an artist as a young man-suggest some of the themes that will obsess the later Brodkey, but they do not invite the same autobiographical speculation. Brodkey's stories from the 60's, all of which first appeared in The New Yorker, display a mature talent, working in fairly conventional forms. Rather, these 600 pages include most of the stories Brodkey has published since his First Love and Other Sorrows (1958), and all the contents of his fine press edition of 1985, Women and Angels. This big hook is not The Big Book-Brodkey's long-awaited work that's supposed to ordain him into Prousthood.
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