Verse and worse

Molly Brodak, a fair, young Polish-American born in Michigan, is a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. Iowa: that hotbed of academic creative writing! Her poems, published in A Little Middle of the Night, are intensely private, pointillist compositions of unconnected images. Now, teaching at Emory University in Atlanta, she has written her first book of prose, which is entirely different, an intimate communication in clear language of shocking candour. Without any evident self-pity, it is as frankly accusative and confessional as an ideal patient’s revelations on a psychiatric couch.

Molly analyses her family and herself, evidently achieving understanding, perhaps even forgiveness, of some excruciating emotional entanglements. She presents a detailed case history of her father that makes Sylvia Plath’s own father seem like Santa Claus. According to Molly, her Dad, Joseph Brodak, was a sociopathological, bigamous, larcenous liar, whose financially disastrous addiction to gambling made him feel compelled to rob banks, though ultimately unsuccessfully. On two criminal sprees, he held up a dozen banks for a total haul of about $44,000 and spent two long terms in prison.

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In the meantime, Molly’s mother, Nora, an affectionate, hard-working clinical psychologist, whom Molly describes as ‘pretty and tough,’ somehow survived suicide attempts and electro-convulsive shocks, while Molly’s older sister Boo, to whom this book is dedicated, managed to get over a childhood of mutual sibling hostility. Possibly looking on the bright side, which was much smaller than the dark side, Molly testifies: ‘I was not raped, starved or maimed, just ignored, and I lived OK in that empty space.