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What had happened to Brodkey’s novel? Were the stories that he had published in the New Yorker related to A Party of Animals? Between Knopf’s acquisition of Brodkey’s novel and the publication of Stories in an Almost Classical Mode, a slim volume of stories titled Women and Angels (1985) had appeared from the Jewish Publication Society. Befitting Brodkey’s eventual reputation as the “American Proust,” the stories dramatized the actions of memory, where murky events of the past contend with the “gray, electrical hush of the mind, remembering, running.” In 1979, the novel went from FSG to Knopf, a move that eventuated in the publication of Stories in an Almost Classical Mode (1988), a 600-page-long collection of fiction that contained Brodkey’s short fiction, including his stories for the New Yorker, but not the novel itself. He reflects on the circumstances of his adoption, the subtle disappointments of childhood, and his complicated relationship with his adoptive family. A precocious Jewish boy grows up in the Midwest and leaves for Harvard.

The stories described situations that resembled Brodkey’s life.

In 1970, Farrar Straus and Giroux (FSG) purchased the novel from Random House, with Brodkey agreeing to a “three-book contract” that would be fulfilled “later that year.” During the 1970s, two long stories appeared in the New Yorker-“A Story in an Almost Classical Mode” (1973) and “Largely an Oral History of My Mother” (1976)-that a subscriber might reasonably have assumed were from the forthcoming novel. The publication history of Brodkey’s novel is so labyrinthian that it is at times difficult to know what’s fact and what’s apocryphal, but the following events demarcate the broad lines of the story. First contracted by Random House in 1964 but unfinished for nearly three decades, the novel-then known under its working title, A Party of Animals-moved between two other publishing houses before its controversial publication under a new name. It’s difficult to think of an American novel with a publication history more complicated than Harold Brodkey’s The Runaway Soul (1991).