 The plot of the novel concerns Brodkey's autobiographical character, Wiley Silenowicz, whose fate closely parallels the author's own childhood in St. Louis in the 1930s.Stylistically, the novel attempts to render sensation into language, following the style of Brodkey's celebrated "New Yorker" stories.In terms of material, much of "The Runaway Soul" was drawn from Brodkey's second collection of short stories, "Stories in an Almost Classical Mode", which in turn was made of Brodkey's entire story output during the period 1963 to 1988.