An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

by Daniel Mendelsohn

these I was drawn to one in particular: the heavy-browed father of a roommate from Houston, a successful architect who, every time he and his wife would come to Virginia to visit their son, loved to take eight or ten of us undergraduates to dinner at the most expensive restaurant in town, quizzing us about the courses we were taking with an exaggerated self-deprecation, as if to say that our studies were way above his capacity to understand, regaling us with amusing Faulknerian stories of his childhood in Mississippi, tales that suggested that he himself was a bit dazzled by the life he had ended up having, although the thing I secretly envied was not the opera or the Petroleum Club or the ocean liners but the easy relationship he had with his handsome son, my friend. This man, to whom I eventually grew very close, would become the most recent in a line of mentors to whom I felt an urgent need to attach myself: men who, it seemed to me, were far more appropriate candidates to father me, with my strange enthusiasms and exotic hobbies, the Fabergé eggs and the hieroglyphics, than my own father had ever been, tinkering endlessly with the transmissions of his failing cars, making the repeated trips to Radio Shack in