Bawer found the book's tone to be "extraordinarily arrogant and self-obsessed." He further wrote, "Brodkey is so fixated upon the tragic memories of his childhood and youth that he has virtually no sense of proportion about them. In one story after another, he offers up pages of gratuitous detail, straining, it seems, to squeeze every last drop of significance out of every last inane particular." Later, in assessing The Runaway Soul, Bawer wrote, "The plain fact is that 99 percent of the prose here is gawky, aimless, repetitive, murky, and pretentious—and there are few more unenviable literary experiences than having to read over eight hundred pages of it." He concluded that the novel was "one of the literary fiascos of all time." "Entering The Runaway Soul," wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times, "is like arriving at a monthlong house party and being accosted at the door by your host, who sticks his mouth in your face and begins to talk." Lehmann-Haupt found the book to be replete with "bogus philosophizing" and "paradoxical non-art," with prose that was "verbose, repetitive, overstuffed with adverbs, of questionable sense, tedious and just plain ugly." In The American Scholar, Michael Dirda criticized the novel's "consummate, unmitigated tedium." Regarding This Wild Darkness, Brenda Bracker in The Baltimore Sun criticized the "long and self-indulgent stretches of the author's much-touted mystical prose" and wrote that "watching Brodkey watch himself die by inches becomes, ultimately, tedious." Several weeks after Brodkey announced in The New Yorker in 1993 that he was suffering from AIDS, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Howard wrote in The New Republic that the disclosure was "a matter of manipulative hucksterism, of mendacious self-propaganda and cruel assertion of artistic privilege, whereby death is made a matter of public relations." In reviewing Brodkey's essay collection Sea Battles on Dry Land for The New York Times, Wendy Steiner wrote that although the anthology "does contain some very good sentences," others were "unspeakable," e.g. "'A car simply is too weak and too complex to be a good symbol, since neither does it plow, and it does not weep either." Moreover, "Brodkey's philosophizing alternates between deconstruction-rivaling nonsense and delusional pieties." Kirkus Reviews complained that in these "self-involved, prolix" essays, "Brodkey seems to be parodying both himself and The New Yorker." Among the offending examples cited were "a superannuated New Journalism style piece on the Academy Awards," "pompously irrelevant analyses