Southernmost and Other Stories — Michael Brodsky

Scattered throughout the novella "Southernmost" are allusions to the poets Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens. Here, Brodsky explores the tension between two types of artists, equally tormented. Stevens, an insurance salesman with an unhappy marriage, led an ordered existence and was massively repressed; Crane, a bisexual, lived the life of a raucous, uninhibited bohemian. Brodsky engineers a meeting between the two at Key West; the title applies both to Key West's physical location and to the fantasy of reaching the limit of being.
Also in the collection are "The Son, He Must Not Know," an investigation of a father/son relationship brought to a critical point by a toy the father purchases for his child; "Ferry" and "The Assessed," abstract examinations of storytelling; "Bagatelle," "The $50,000 a Year Man," and "Partridges, and Nothing But," which, echoing scenes out of Kafka, together analyze the working life - what it is to have to take orders, to be caught in the absurdities of an organization, the necessity to endure what Beckett called "incandescent grey" in order to survive.
Brodsky's work, like that of his literary predecessors - Beckett, Kafka, and Proust - places serious demands on its readers. But just as there is no question Brodsky is not a "light read," there is also no question but that he is developing a body of work that marks him among the most important writers and thinkers of our age.