He finds refuge in the company of a seven-year-old child he babysits, “a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved. Even more extraordinary, and - perhaps strangely, considering the subject - almost as painful, is the last section of a four-part story called ''Innocence. As he casts himself back into his thirteen-year-old self, he fluctuates, as adolescents do, between harsh self-criticism and high self-regard. In our opposed forms of loneliness and self-recognition and recognition of the other, we touched each other often as we spoke and on shore in explorations of the past, we strolled with our arms linked. Louis, when his father was slowly dying in a hospital and he felt alienated from his mother and isolated from his peers. “The State of Grace” is told in the voice of a young man looking back on his adolescent years in St. Harold Brodkey (1930 1996) is a major twentieth-century American writer of highly polished, highly poetic fiction first published in The New Yorker, Esquire and other magazines over a thirty years span, 1960s through the 1990s. He claimed to have written it in forty-five minutes, and it appeared when he was only twenty-four, but, as Ford says, it contains “moments of great virtuosity” and an early taste of the writer’s interest in portraying “life seen from the inside of someone’s mind.”

“One doesn’t think about Harold Brodkey anymore,” says Richard Ford, who reads Harold Brodkey’s 1954 story “ The State of Grace” on this month’s Fiction Podcast, but “there was a time when the words ‘Harold’ and ‘Brodkey’ were on everybody’s lips in New York.” “The State of Grace” was Brodkey’s first published story.

Harold brodkey innocence