As he casts himself back into his thirteen-year-old self, he fluctuates, as adolescents do, between harsh self-criticism and high self-regard. Louis, when his father was slowly dying in a hospital and he felt alienated from his mother and isolated from his peers. “The State of Grace” is told in the voice of a young man looking back on his adolescent years in St. He claimed to have written it in forty-five minutes, and it appeared when he was only twenty-four, but, as Ford says, it contains “moments of great virtuosity” and an early taste of the writer’s interest in portraying “life seen from the inside of someone’s mind.”
“One doesn’t think about Harold Brodkey anymore,” says Richard Ford, who reads Harold Brodkey’s 1954 story “ The State of Grace” on this month’s Fiction Podcast, but “there was a time when the words ‘Harold’ and ‘Brodkey’ were on everybody’s lips in New York.” “The State of Grace” was Brodkey’s first published story.
