Article: Embracing Contradiction

PROFANE FRIENDSHIP

By Harold Brodkey

Farrar Straus Giroux. 384 pp. $22

HAROLD BRODKEY'S new novel is about the friendship between Niles O'Hara, an American brought to Venice as a child and soon known as Nino, and Giangiacomo Gallieni, a true Venetian, known as Onni. They meet as young schoolboys, and develop one of those intense and largely inexplicable bonds - a kind of love which later cools and is interrupted by war and distance, then rekindles, veers towards sex and veers away, but endures, still complexly eroticized, into old age. The two men are quite unlike each other, Nino sensually shy, difficult, philosophical, Onni whorish, unknowable and obsessed by his sense of his own ...

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