The meticulous inventory of sexual sighs, moans, and tremblings seduces the reader into the scene: we look back and forth between their faces, trying to interpret their expressions. The seamless swerve from interior monologue to omniscient description is Brodkey’s high-wire act. Pleasure and pleasing reveal their kinship, since Wiley’s desire to pleasure Orra is inseparable from his hunger to please her. “Any attempted act confers vulnerability since only she could judge it,” Wiley explains. The first-person speaker deifies Orra: she is the monument, the mystery, the god, and the court. Both the narrator and his object of desire emerge in parts, in pieces, in pleasures sought. Harold Brodkey’s barococo ‘Innocence’ portrays a college girlfriend, Orra, as seen by her lover, Wiley.
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