The critic James Wood begins his book “How Fiction Works” with this little dictum: “The house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors.” The same basic tenet can be applied, I think, to literary criticism. There are only so many ways one can write about a book. There is the New Critics-style textual approach: a no-frills method that sticks to the text itself, analyzing its properties and techniques wholly from within. One may take the historical stance (think of New Historicist critic Stephen Greenblatt) — that is, telling the history of the work itself, its cultural peculiarities, as well as its influence on subsequent generations, in order to gain insight into the time in which it was written. Also, a writer can enumerate his or her own personal experience with a book, a category Joyce Carol Oates referred to as “bibliomemoir”: how it changed, challenged or charged them. A writer can parody a novel or play or poem, employing the same techniques and stylistics, often for the sake of poking fun of the author’s quirks. Then, finally, there is the extrapolative technique, which is predicated on the idea that literature can matter to our everyday lives, or that books can be used to demonstrate principles of other intellectual discourses, like those Blackwell Philosophy and Pop Culture books that all end with ... and Philosophy.
Though most books about books employ more than one of these tactics, the critic Daniel Mendelsohn, in his newest offering, “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic,” does all five in one. And these aren’t mere gestures toward each method — each approach receives equal playing time. Mendelsohn examines the text of “The Odyssey” with depth and classical acumen; he explores the historical importance of Homer’s ancient poem with the comfortable clarity of someone who has spent decades immersed in Greek literature; he details his own relationship with Odysseus’ tale, from childhood to college to teaching the work himself; and, finally, he culls from the narrative many insights into his own familial bonds, specifically with his father.
The story can be summed up in Mendelsohn’s opening line: “One January evening a few years ago, just before the beginning of the spring term in which I was going to be teaching an undergraduate seminar on the Odyssey, my father, a retired research scientist who was then aged eighty-one, asked me, for reasons I thought I understood at the time, if he might sit in on the course, and I said yes.” Another important plot point also comes in the first few pages: “[i]n June, fresh from our recent immersion in the text of the Homeric epic, we took the [“Retracing the Odyssey”] cruise, which lasted ten days in all, one day for each year of Odysseus’ long journey home.”
These exposition-heavy opening lines are not there by accident. Mendelsohn, as he does throughout “An Odyssey,” is employing the same techniques as the blind bard used in his poem. “All classical epics,” Mendelsohn writes, “begin with what scholars call a proem: the introductory lines that announce to the audience what the epic is about.” If the “Odyssey” contains a proem, so too does “An Odyssey.” If Odysseus’ tale emerges via “ring composition” (which Mendelsohn usefully informs us is when “the narrator will start to tell a story only to pause and loop back to some earlier moment that helps explain an aspect of the story he’s telling”), then Mendelsohn’s personal histories are introduced with the same method.
Throughout, Mendelsohn expertly examines not only the story of the “Odyssey” but the idiosyncrasies of its language. He’s fluent in Greek, and can extract fascinating insights from the tiniest components of a 12,110-line poem. And he obviously knows the “Odyssey” with such intimacy that he culls out meaning from even the most subtle moments.
But the most entertaining part of “An Odyssey” may be the many classroom scenes, which offer some fun group discussions (replete with the undergraduates’ contemporary takes on the epic) and, through Mendelsohn’s father, some tense and humorous moments. Though sometimes these episodes can take on a somewhat didactic quality, they function as an enjoyable way of diving into the text.
And Mendelsohn’s father, Jay, adds some much-needed humor to the academic setting, indignantly announcing at the beginning of the course, “‘Hero?’ I don’t think [Odysseus is] a hero at all,” even though he promised his son he’d only observe. He’s curmudgeonly, to be sure, but he’s also a whip-smart research scientist and mathematician. His interjections during the “Odyssey” class are not the ravings of an old man yelling at a cloud, but the insights of someone with lived experience and an exacting intelligence. His participation isn’t merely fodder for age-gap-based hilarity; it is a final act for a dedicated learner. By the time the seminar reaches the reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus, at the end of the semester, Mendelsohn’s father has become a part of the class and his presence leads to a revealing and dramatic moment.
Mendelsohn has delved into these waters before, albeit not all at once. His memoir “The Lost: The Search for Six of Six Million,” in which the author struggled for five years to discover what happened to six of his relatives during the Holocaust, showed Mendelsohn’s tender skills with difficult subject matter and his mastery of nonfiction narrative. His essay collections, “Waiting for the Barbarians” and “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken,” demonstrate the vast range of his critical acumen. A widely published critic and a scholar in his own right (his Princeton dissertation was published by Oxford University Press as “Gender and the City in Euripides’ Political Plays”), Mendelsohn in “An Odyssey” shows a dexterity with tone and pacing, switching as he does between the various approaches to his themes.
The trouble with Mendelsohn’s multifaceted style is that deep scrutiny, personal narrative, literary history and classics-derived life lessons don’t all possess wide appeal. Readers may find they have more interest in one of the five braided techniques (most likely the narrative with Mendelsohn and Jay), which will mean they’ll have to plod through the other parts in order to get to the stuff they like. But for those with broad curiosity and a tolerance for intellectual hopscotching, “An Odyssey” is a journey worth taking.
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