Bloomsday: A Tragicomedy

In David B. Lentz's novel, Bloomsday, Thomas Daedalus, son of the late Stephen Daedalus and a Harvard philosophy professor, explains the role of Dionysus in Nietsche's concept of "eternal recurrence" to a class of undergrads. As with most elements in this finely crafted and vibrant novel, "eternal recurrence" is no throwaway, but the tonic theme of Mr.Lentz's engaging and heart-felt homage to Homer and Joyce.

In Bloomsday, David B. Lentz has transported the story of Ulysses to 1974 Boston and Cambridge, loosely recasting the principals of Daedulus, Bloom, Molly (here, Penelope, as in The Odyssey), Mulligan, Haines, Boylan, and a particularly amusing Pisser Burke as latter-day Americans. In Bloomsday, one reads stage notes from Homer and hears mellifluous echoes of Joyce's Irish English. Yet, within the spirit and structure of the older works, David B. Lentz has created a contemporary story in the same way that jazz soloists improvise from the American songbook.

That Mr. Lentz has fashioned an American, post-Vietnam love-poem to Boston on the armature of an ancient and Modernist classic is a literary tactic consistent with the essence of storytelling. "Eternal recurrence" springs not just from a change of seasons, but a human proclivity for mimesis--imitation. The essence of storytelling is to repeat a tale until it is as finely wrought as verse a blind vagabond can recite.

But are all legends worth adopting and adapting?

If conditions of life are timeless and universal, those myths that embody them must be, as well. Mr. Lentz has put The Odyssey to the reading-eye test: are the reunion of father and son and the restoral of home and family after long estrangement as germane to us now as they were to Joyce and the audiences of Homer?

The evidence from Bloomsday is an unequivocal "Yes."

Each novel is begotten from the stories that came before, in dialogue with other voices. Yet, when one novel overtly adapts an earlier work, as Bloomsday does with Ulysses, the reader is less concerned with what is lost in translation than with how the two versions clash and coexist in the mind.

The tension between two sensibilities can be dynamic, yielding irony and narrative freedom. Homage can turn to parody. For instance, by hijacking Homer's epic plot, Joyce was free to lampoon the base subjugation of colonial Dublin and the shabby banality of modern life.

In Bloomsday, Lentz has turned adaptation to a different purpose. By importing Ulysses to post-Vietnam Boston, he has deployed Joyce's special effects to intensify and glamorize everyday lives during a turbulent, yet depressing era when America had a disgraced president, a defeated army, racial, cultural and sexual confusion, spiking crime, and a stagflated economy. Strains of Joycean music imbue many moments in Bloomsday with beauty and gravitas, inviting us to heed the details of the world and recognize the value and potential in our lives--to make them mythic. Such old world overtones also evoke a languid formality alien to modern America--like a tweed cap at a baseball game.

Yet, despite its old-world penumbra, Bloomsday is no remake of Ulysses in an American setting. Though Thom Daedalus and Rudy Bloom use the Irish "Tis", the soundtrack of Bloomsday has Americans speaking their minds. One ambles down the storied streets of Boston and imbibes a profusion of cultural and sensuous charms of the "Athens of America." One brushes against damaged, Vietnam vets and kindly, old seamen, working class urbanites and affluent Yuppies, working women and sex workers, cops, hustlers, shop assistants and a hilariously feckless Right-to-Life priest. The reader experiences a specific time and place and the principal characters emerge from their Joycean molds as originals with their own ambiguities, ambitions and preoccupations. They flatter, advise, insult and argue with each other, like voices inside one universal mind--youth and age, passion and reason, madness and caution--waging a pitched debate over how to lead one's life.

It is to Mr.Lentz's credit as a novelist that the world he has conjured in Bloomsday is new--a synthesis of Joyce and American optimism. We hear reverberations of Ulysses but none of its dark pessimism. Mr. Lentz's `70's Boston is a warm and glowing burg, where the good guys win and bad guys lose. This is a place not of bleak ambivalence but of happy endings.

While it is tempting to focus on the intellectual attributes of a novel with such wide compass and deep roots, Bloomsday is also fun, brimming with broad humor and dry wit. Boisterous, outrageous, at times improbable, and always diverting, Bloomsday: The Bostoniad does what fiction should. It transports the reader to another place, where life unfolds exotically enough to entertain us. And while it works on many levels, and will excite Joyce lovers, no prior reading list is required to enjoy Bloomsday. It pays tribute to its forebears but sings in its own voice. -- Eric Sonnenschein, Novelist, Author of "Ad Nomad"