He’s (the narrator is) so painstakingly sensitive to Orra and who she is – and that’s also a big part of the story – it’s Orra reaching human completion, I think, through sexual completion (orgasm). And it’s incredible to read his voice, the matter-of-fact but touchingly tender twenty-one-year-old (or older? how old is the narrator when he tells the story how long past Orra?) who thinks far too much (or just the right amount) – analyzes the act of sex as if it’s literature, and refers to it as such, in that frame of reference (all the talk of fictional frames and feminizing and interpretation of events that may or may not be accurate really he’s got it down to symbolic sex, where the sex is symbolic of the relationship).
He’s deconstructed one of the most momentous actions of youth into its component parts, thoughts and movements…it’s incredible. I find it wonderful, too, that he’s stretched out for thirty-some pages what is, for the most part, a single act, all one day – the Romantics (Melville, Hawthorne, Shelley, etc.) did this, but without nearly his style. It’s not even that Brodkey seems to know everything exactly about not just sex, but love – but it is that, and that he captures the awkwardness and scrambling and determination that goes into every motion, every thought it’s that he knows somehow what it’s like to be a woman (“There’s a kind of strain or intensity women are bred for…They need death and nobility near.”) and what it’s like to be a child and an adult it’s that all of his descriptions are dead on and his words are perfect – luminous, incandescent. It’s not the first time I’ve read it (the first was a couple years ago), but it’s only gotten better as I’ve gotten older. This is the most perfect story I’ve ever read. Oh hay! I figured it couldn’t hurt for me to do a reader response too, so here goes…
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