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

by Daniel Mendelsohn

prevent another clot they put him on blood thinners, and it was the blood thinners that caused the stroke, the diluted blood leaking through the blood vessels of his brain, the tiny vessels which, the neurosurgeon later told us, all those early years of smoking had made dangerously friable.

But my father doesn’t smoke. He quit years ago, I think in 1970. The doctor shook his head. It’s a long time, I know, but believe me the damage is already done.

I thought of the Odyssey course. The epic is so filled with stories, not least those told by its hero, tales both true and false, outright lies and “enhanced” versions of things that really did happen; everything that happens, it reminds us, can be a gripping story in the hands of the right storyteller.

A father makes his son out of his flesh and out of his mind and then shapes him with his ambitions and dreams, with his cruelties and failures, too. But a son, although he is of his father, cannot know his father totally, because the father precedes him;

My father had said, A good book leaves you wanting more.

I stood against a wall and observed my father watching the ball game with my boys. They were arguing about a call on a play. I thought of Laertes in the one last moment of glory he was so improbably granted on the battlefield, exulting in the fact that he had lived to see the day when he could stand on the field of battle together with his son and grandson. “Ah, what a day for me!” Odysseus’ father says.