With the aid of his editor, William Maxwell, a childhood friend of his wife, Brodkey began his writing career by contributing short stories to The New Yorker and other magazines.

[2] The author is most famous for his breathtaking conversational skills, his progressively more complex text and for taking 32 years to complete his much anticipated first novel, published in 1991 as The Runaway Soul.

As 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.

"[4] 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.

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.

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.

"[7] 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."

"[9] "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".

Among the offending examples cited were "a superannuated New Journalism style piece on the Academy Awards," "pompously irrelevant analyses of the 1992 presidential campaign," and "preciously insubstantial vignettes" for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section.