a Paris Review interview noted, "The work became something of an object of desire for editors; it was moved among publishing houses for what were rumored to be ever-increasing advances, advertised as a forthcoming title (Party of Animals) in book catalogs, expanded and ceaselessly revised, until its publication seemed an event longer awaited than anything without theological implications." In 1983 the Saturday Review referred to "A Party of Animals" as "now reportedly comprising 4,000 pages and announced as forthcoming 'next year' every year since 1973." During this period, Brodkey published a number of stories, most of them in The New Yorker, that dealt with a set of recurring characters—the evidently autobiographical Wiley Silenowicz and his adoptive family—and which were announced as fragments of the novel. His editor at Knopf, Gordon Lish, called the novel in progress "the one necessary American narrative work of this century." Literary critic Harold Bloom declared: "If he's ever able to solve his publishing problems, he'll be seen as one of the great writers of his day." In addition to publishing, Brodkey earned a living during this period by writing television pilot scripts for NBC, and teaching at Cornell University. Three long stories from "A Party of Animals" were collected in Women and Angels (1985), and a larger number, including those three, appeared in 1988's Stories in an Almost Classical Mode. Brodkey had apparently decided to omit them from the novel, for when, in 1991, he published The Runaway Soul, a very long novel (835 pages) dramatizing Wiley's early life, no material from Stories in an Almost Classical Mode was included. The novel seems to be either "A Party of Animals" under a new title or the first volume of an eventual multivolume work. Brodkey made some comments that suggested the latter. Brodkey's second novel, Profane Friendship, appeared in 1994. Criticism From the beginning of his career, Brodkey accrued detractors. Reviewing First Love for The Christian Science Monitor, Melvin Maddocks wrote that "a sense of vital, untampered-with conflict is missing. These stories seem too patly, too cautiously worked out. They are Japanese-garden fiction with every pebble in place." A critic for The Atlantic Monthly similarly complained that Brodkey "appears to be the kind of artist committed to working in the minor key which The New Yorker has made fashionable." Kirkus Reviews called Stories in an Almost Classical Mode an "endless kvetch." In The New Criterion, Bruce