I wanted to start out discussing the baggage that comes with reading this book and the challenge of attempting to reach a verdict on its quality in out-of-5-star form, let alone that of trying to write a coherent response. But unfortunately, I’ve already covered that intro ground with another review. But where I succeeded in not becoming a slobbering fanboy or prickish contrarian on that occasion, I have here, much to my own surprise, failed. During the early episodes of the book I felt like I was in 3- or 4-star territory. But then came the Shakespearean Scylla and Charybdis sequence and I started getting excited; a few chapters later I read the Cyclops episode, which caused me to become, in my wife’s astute summation, ‘giddy’. I swallowed the rest of this book in a couple of days, foregoing the finishing of The Odyssey itself, which was purportedly my preparation for Joyce’s celebrated novel. My final, overwhelmingly positive response to Ulysses was an unexpected delight after holding the impression that Joyce's works, while enjoyable, might not be for me in the same way as those of some of his contemporaries. I wasn't completely bowled over by A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in high school or by Dubliners a few weeks back. I’d even read the first 100 pages of Ulysses back in 2008 before getting sidetracked by War and Peace, the conception of a nearly year-long Russian fever that began to abate about the time I became enamored with this website. But that initial setting down of the book was likely a blessing, as fresh Shakespeare and Homer reads go a long way toward increasing a layered understanding of and gratification from this novel.

I think the primary reason that I enjoy plodding Realist epics and plotless Modernist fare is that I find human drama and psychology, realistically portrayed, to be endlessly interesting. There's no topic too boring when laid out truthfully in a prose that elevates the mundane to a realm demanding rapt attention via aesthetic alchemy. To successfully embrace and conquer the ordinary takes a special writer, but I remain easily enthralled when Proust or Woolf wax prolix on table setting rituals or when Tolstoy dallies on a hirsute upper lip. Joyce moves a step further with the whole 'make the quotidian interesting' approach and, for me, it works because it seems—to every part of my mind and experience--true. Bloom and Stephen are real people with thoughts and actions, ranging from the tedious to the generous to the despicable, that are often wincingly human. They’re presented to us in a way that’s wildly imaginative and über-detailed yet considerate of our desire to follow a well-arced human story. And this, Goodreaders, is why I read.

It’s often difficult to love a book when the main characters are unlikeable, and I know this is a problem that some have had with Ulysses. Thankfully, I found myself caring more and more for Bloom, in spite of and because of his numerous flaws, as June 16, 1904 wore on. Our hero constantly dwells on his cuckolded state and occasionally even on suicide. It's clear that he's an outsider and has to make an extra effort just to remain at the periphery of his social circle. Something about the way his mind works, how it bounces around curiously from topic to topic without dwelling too much on his misfortunes, is genuinely affecting. There's little woe-is-me with Bloom; he’s just a real-life accepter, trying to get by while nursing modest bourgeois dreams. It’s this upbeat-in-spite-of-everything attitude, tinged with a degree of compassion not found elsewhere in the book, that makes him so endearing. Given that we have access to every bit of his mental processing, the transgressions of his mind (mostly sexual and adulterous in nature) seem minimal and intrinsically human. Some serious critics claim that Joyce needed an editor, but we require all of Bloom's thoughts: the irrelevant, the irreverent, the erroneous, the silly, the serious. And with these thoughts we get excellent treatments of all the themes (and more) for which I come to fiction: death, lust, love, existence, virtue, debauchery, justice, purpose.

A day after finishing the book, I’m still struck by Joyce’s ability to render such a rounded character within a generic 24-hour period. By the end of the book we know Bloom intimately, but as with the people we know best in our own lives, there are aspects of him that remain mysterious and conflicted. Bloom’s strong points are often so well-connected to his weak ones that it can be difficult to conclude which is which. For instance, Bloom seems always to think the best of people even after they’ve behaved horribly. Following a man’s drunken and public cries of anti-Semitism, Bloom thinks that he probably meant no harm and was just riled up from the drink; he silently forgives him. But then he considers that he (Bloom) might have gone too far by declaring, in defense, that Christ was a Jew. He’s finally stood up for himself (in one of my favorite passages ever), but he ends up feeling guilty about it, a guilt that betrays a weakness in his character or, from a shifted perspective, a strength gone too far. He also treats Stephen’s ill-considered remarks and behavior charitably, blaming these on the detrimental influence of mean friends. Bloom sees himself as Stephen's personal 'catcher in the rye', and while he’s impotent to prevent the violence visited up young Dedalus late in the story, he does manage to salvage his money and personal effects. He goes beyond this service, however, by paying off Stephen’s brothel debt and even returning his money with interest, becoming his Good Samaritan or, to stick with The Odyssey, his Eumaeus—the loyal swineherd who helps a travel-battered Odysseus upon his long awaited return to Ithaca.

Regarding this story’s relationship with The Odyssey, one of the most obvious points of dissonance between the two is with the notion of heroism. In Homer’s epic, we have the quintessential manly-man whose fighting skills and wit are second to none, and who ultimately defeats his enemies via large-scale slaughter. In Ulysses, we have the effeminate, cuckolded social outsider who uses his curious and well-meaning perspective to defeat his enemies with magnanimity. And Joyce doesn’t just invert Homer's idea of a hero, but also Shakespeare's representation of a cuckolded husband. In Shakespeare’s world, the cuckold is someone to be laughed at, the butt of all jokes, and the embarrassment and even the responsibility of the man who couldn't control his wife. Joyce makes cuckolding appear tragic while not overstating its importance, at one point listing dozens of deeds that are worse, including everything from mayhem and contempt of court to criminal assault and manslaughter. The imminent cuckolding pops up in nearly every episode (maybe all of them), hounding and haunting Bloom. There’s no wool over his eyes. He knows and, in a way, allows the act to happen due to his own perceived powerlessness over the situation. In a later episode, I thought that side character Gerty (a stand in for The Odyssey’s Nausicaa) had spied out a sad-looking Stephen Dedalus on the beach, but a few pages later we find out this man with the despondent countenance is actually Bloom. When I realized that Gerty’s pity wasn’t in response to the ennui of an intellectually-tortured dilettante but to a man who was currently experiencing an intimate betrayal, the episode reached a peak of poignancy. And then in true Joycean fashion, he moves right past this moment to one of lust and masturbation, complete with a climax joined by beach fireworks that’s reminiscent of the love scene between Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief.

Where Bloom may get into trouble with readers (and Joyce with censors) is with his lustful, objectifying, and lecherous thoughts. And it’s this frank sexual honesty that’s still surprising and blush-inducing 80 years later. Bloom's specific lustings and yearnings aren’t universal to the male experience, but they are recognizably human in their sui generis imagining. The very specificity of his desire, at times quite blunt and offensive, is certainly what led to the charges of vulgarity and indecency. For it has been common throughout history to treat sexual proclivities not shared by oneself as strange, creepy, and even dangerous. So Bloom is, as he’s referred to in the hallucinatory Circe episode, ‘No Man and Everyman’, at once ordinary and extraordinary. Exhibiting Bloom’s fetishes so completely is what pushes this novel into a realm of reality that was at the time unexplored, and perhaps not yet bested in the fiction that’s followed.

Almost as if he sensed that the reader may be building up too much sympathy for Bloom in spite of his occasional creepiness, Joyce decided to bring him down a few notches after his side of the story is finished. We’re reminded that we’ve only been getting half of the picture with his marriage and that two genuine experiences do not always add up to the same interpretation of reality. Once we get to hear Molly’s voice, we find that in certain instances the two of them are simply misinformed about the actions and thoughts of the other. Communication has been damaged, perhaps irreparably. In other cases we get the fullest realization of one of the primary themes in the book: parallax, an astronomic concept that Joyce uses metaphorically throughout the novel. One of the great misfortunes or, depending on the circumstances, boons of humanity is that because we see certain events and ideas from disparate locations with respect to context, intellect, gender, nationality, etc., we perceive these things differently, despite the fact that in reality, outside the world of perception, they are the same. Thus, Bloom and Molly feel that the other is to blame for many of the problems—recognized independently from distinct perspectives—in their marriage. Joyce also employs the concept of parallax stylistically, utilizing different prose formats for each episode and forcing us to confront the ways in which a writer’s stylistic and aesthetic sensibilities influence the way we perceive a narrative and react to it emotionally.

So anyway, here we are. Living our lives; reading our books. Experiencing reality through the ineluctable modality of the visible. Does this book have anything to say about the big questions of life and how to derive some meaning from this giant mess? Yes, yes it does. The world of Ulysses revolves around a single Word, a concept that's refracted into many meanings and contexts. Each of the three main characters—Bloom/Odysseus, Stephen/Telemachus, and Molly/Penelope—ultimately recognizes its power, its necessity as the grounding of their lives. But only one of them has the bravery to weather charges of sentimentality and soft-heartedness, to utter the Word in the face of cruel mocking; that's our hero, that ‘conscious reactor against the void incertitude,’ Leopold Bloom. Here on Goodreads I haven’t his courage, and I will name it along with Stephen as ‘the word known to all men.’