This Wild Darkness

One day in the spring of 1993, author Harold Brodkey checked into a Manhattan emergency room unable to move and scarcely able to breathe. When he was later diagnosed with the AIDS virus, Brodkey greeted the devastating - and completely unexpected - news with an odd lightheartedness, a perverse fascination with his passage from the ranks of the living to the fraternity of the dying. As a novelist, he refused the fate that had been assigned to him: his acute editorial sensibility told him that he had been badly miscast as a condemned man. In This Wild Darkness, Brodkey, who died on January 26,…