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Less like a scratchpad for an incomplete novel, the characters in each story become more clues for a crossword puzzle, where a Leah or a Ben intersects with a Kim or a Dylan a few pages back and doubtlessly will set up revelations further down the road. “Romcom” even posits that anyone of them will “reincarnate inside my own body” (p. 83) so get ready the pushpins and string for the grand narrative corkboard.

The final brush strokes of this Portrait are as ambiguous as the initial ones, where the titular youth has lots to say about the arts, but does little to make some of his own. The introduction does a better job of understanding the paucity of Stephen’s stanza than a whole horde of college friends he hangs out with, yet Cranly has the sense to egg him on about the ladies absent from Stephen’s stuffy life.

In a moment of synchronicity, my progress reading this book matches somewhat with the present day, being a New Year’s celebration - of course, the novel uses the much more sensible spring start date, but still carries an emotional impact. Genji tours his palace full of ladies in his keeping, while his oldest son Yugiri is ready to follow his example. Out with the old and in with the new, possessive woman collector.

I liked it better when the random collection of anecdotes were of an one-and-done variety, separate tales of middle aged millennials sharing bits of their world. Now everything seems to hinge around a transvestite named Trashe and random stories are a bit too calculated, but then this is exactly what popular entertainment became: a bingeable universe that has altered storytelling from the aftermath of September 11th.

Outgrowing his parochial family and Jesuit school system, Stephen seems to find his calling as an artist, one who creates his works of art through words. So many of them were confusingly jumbled together in earlier chapters, and yet it is perhaps the most straightforward narrative I have yet encountered with Joyce. The next obstacle in his journey into adulthood is the English language as opposed to his native Irish.

The happy pair continue their slow slide into indifference and misery, with a small sliver of hope dawning upon Mr. Dombey, starting to see Florence as the closest he will come to an authentic connection to love and a legacy, but he continues to undervalue the relationship. Who knows what is happening with Captain Cuttle and the Midshipman, maybe somehow signifying a return for Sol and Wally, and comeuppance for Rob?

Johansson’s infectious optimism for innovation comes to a head in the final chapters of Part Three, encouraging curious minds to leave familiar networks and take risks. Increasingly his advice begins to sound like Fortune 500 cookies that allowed some of the leading entrepreneurial ghouls of the 2010s to build bypasses above their intersections, keeping wealth out of the hands of weary would-be innovators.

I get that the titular Artist and author are one and the same, an autobiographical account of Joyce growing up in Dublin, but where is the line slanting between the autobio in this graphic account of an insular Stephen resisting the world within which he finds himself? Theatre is a trifle, girls an annoyance, his family a frustration, and most of the third chapter taken up with sermons on St. Xavier’s day.

The intersectionalizing of chapter subheadings continues by taking a crack at MacGyver, the fictional (and soon-to-be father of MacGruber) Medici-minded crime-solver. While this and a return to Pixar/Jobs’ success story are welcome diversions from the rah-rah venture capitalist heroes, a subtle undertone of being prepared to fail and break away from value networks provides the explosive formula for true innovation.

After a lengthy chapter about prevailing thoughts on a dream’s meaning by other authors lost in the woods, Freud gets to his scientific theory, which posits that latent content can be determined through interpretation. He defends his position, “though Birnan Wood be come to Dunsinane,” how all dreams are thus wishes fulfilled with several examples of self-vindication and increasing perversity from his patients.

I begrudgingly admit that the Medici effect is an explosive factor for discovering innovation, but makes it all the more disconcerting to read how it is a combination of luck and persistence. Many of the cherry-picked examples are inspiring if you already happen to be a billionaire with resources to burn through on your way to a big breakthrough. Plus diversity helps, but wasn’t Tubular Bells an all-white ensemble?

Young manhood begins inauspiciously with a nursery rhyme and soon fast forwards to Clongowes Wood College with an order of Jesuit thugs ready to beat sense into the witless sinners such as Stephen. He remains a bit behind the discussion of independence-seeking Irish politicians that gets his family worked up and even the extensive endnotes are an abstraction of the lived experience of an artist on the move to Dublin.

Genji’s exile in Suma comes across as a stormy weekend at a destination resort, yet feels like the end of the world while he endures this unexpected disgrace. Like a storm, the exile soon passes as he is recalled to the Capitol and resumes his former life of leisure. Yet in the storm’s wake are frustrated, displaced women. How telling it is that the author lingers on Kaguya legend in the picture contest.

The story behind the book is impressive: MBA drop-out makes good and publishes a book on the intersection of different fields. The book itself, that’s a different story, mostly a jumble of juxtapositions not unlike the Netflix series Cowboy Bebop I just binge-watched, except here with less charm. Most intersections are from Lower Manhattan area and his praise of CGI movies mixes Steve Job, Pixar and Shrek!

Really trying to keep an open mind about this “major and most original work” that established a whole new scientific methodology for understanding of dreams, but OMG, get on with it! 56 pages of prefaces and introductory material which paint a picture of Freud as a falsely modest man of letters while others who knew him well enough tell of his literary indifference, so strap in for a rocky ride on the royal road.

Saving all the drama for the final three chapters with an giant leap forward into a brief glimpse of union while the rest of the country “was losing its collective marbles one by one” (p. 349) shows you how most of the domestic issues throughout the novel were mostly in Lucy’s head, maybe a bit of Joseph’s short attention span too. Not being able to be in the moment would have led them down a depressing path.

Stepping outside his field onto the greener side of the fence, from the dark depth of psychology to the bright, colourful world of literature and art, Jung firstly admits that he has no real claim to analyze this other place. Coming from this awe-struck mindset, he seemingly pulls a fast one by being bored by Joyce and perplexed by Picasso until the reader notices the respect he carefully places under unturned rocks.

For all the sparkle of cultural and generational misunderstandings: Joseph’s take on watching As You Like It or hosting a dinner party, Jaz’s loose grip on a driving metaphor but solid grasp of gray tings, or Lucy’s ill-advised cup of tea with his chastising mother, there is a dull sense of what is attracting one to the other. It doesn’t help given the many times they joke about finding someone else.

If only international relations between Britain and Europe were like the sex life of Joseph and Lucy: they split up, try to move on with different partners, but are no sooner separated than working their way back into each other’s arms. Maybe given enough time, this will happen to the UK, too? And like any event since 2016, soon as results are in there is one party who regrets it. Is Joseph looking for his way out?

Came to bury Freudian reductive method, not to praise him! While it must have been an awkward memorial service, Jung speaks from his heart, painfully recalling his former colleague’s lack of interest in subjects outside his field of research. And to show that it is nothing personal, he enthusiastically memorializes Wilhelm for showing him the way to synchronicity and artists who conjure up a collective unconscious.

At the halfway point of the novel, the lingering question of in or out causes its own rift between Lucy, Joseph and the world each belongs. Much like the robot bombing of London in The End of the Affair, an unavoidable historic event reflects the personal turmoil of a love that seems to have run its course. Lucy hits on the divisiveness of deep-set views while Joseph tries to remain both in and out of union.

The tone of his personal portraits of Paracelsus and Freud are admittedly incomplete, especially for the medieval mystic whose literary output is both messy and masterful. Clearly a man ahead of his times, which contrasts with psychoanalysis’ founding figure Freud, who is “an answer to the sickness of the nineteenth century” (p. 37) as well as a possible symptom for his sexual drive that steers us all backwards

Speaking about movies, an entire montage sequence of bad dates that are a common staple of romantic comedies gets compressed into one chapter doubled up for Lucy and Joseph so that the coupling of the main pair could happen. Even while enduring Michael and Jaz, respectively, the main pair had each other on one’s mind. The romance is rushed, but as Joseph’s mother points out, there are other narrative fish to fry.

Feels like a return to form for Hornby, not that he has strayed to far from the overthought inner monologue of frustrated folk. State of the Union with less dialogue but still an eye for how things would seem as a movie. Lucy shares her subversive opinions on schooling while Joseph channels the young lad Nick from Fever Pitch while also beset with racial profiling and generational misunderstandings.

The final seminar of this collection seems a bit off, not simply due the Dream Interpretation Ancient & Modern that ran concurrently with this topic. Maybe it was just World War Two that had students distracted by events surrounding Switzerland, yet even Professor Jung does not seems to be himself. His criticism of Mr. Huber’s analysis of the tiger dream shows an otherwise open-minded psychologist on edge.

Cleverly drawing out the distinction “we” tend to make between our individual sense of “I” and the abstraction of “me,” Watts further calls into question everything I know about the me-body, which turns out to have a greater intelligence than I can fathom. By making these seemingly familiar notions of self strange, he offers an experiment of being present in pain as a gentle way to experience the present.

Letting his woman run wild in the last few chapters, they show a range of sensibilities that are a far cry from the demure, dutiful heroines of earlier novels; an archetype of which Florence is perhaps the only representative. Edith in a fury gets married to her man, spurned Miss Tox has her spinsterhood thrown in her face and Alice is an avenging force majeure coming for all the Carkers, landing at Harriet’s door.

In spite of the high praise from Deepak Caesar, Watts’ other little book uncovers the pain and belief for the good life that should simply be good for everyone, all the time. The age of anxiety extends decades from his postwar moment, well into the War on Terror era. And it is mostly due to human consciousness of time that we all strive for some better future that our slim present is the envy of no animal on earth.

Stage actor Anna steps into centre stage, no longer Rostov’s favourite button to unbutton but rather an empowered character who helps Sophia achieve a freedom only imagined by her adoptive father. The sped-up history of Soviet drudgery outside the Metropol is merely a backdrop that the Count himself may soon fade into as his more dynamic nom-de-plume counterpart Mishka makes a literary exit by the end of Book Four.

The dreams studied in class get shorter and shorter, barely fitting into the four-part structure elaborated upon many pages ago. And yet, the symbolic meaning found by his impressive roster of psychology students (starting with star pupil, Ms. von Franz) becomes more complex and inward-looking. In some cases the young dreamers are already dead before their analyses, there is an eerie sense of preconscious time slips.