Bloomsday

This is an astonishing book. In Bloomsday the magic of David Lentz’s imagination has produced a fictional transmigration of souls, a rebirth of James Joyce’s characters in a modern time and place. Dedalus, Bloom, Haines, Buck Mulligan and others of the original Dublin cast have been reborn in contemporary Boston. Mr. Lentz has accomplished this feat not only with prodigious erudition, but also with a delicate whimsy and an exquisitely chiseled poetic language. For this is a poetic prose of the first order -- lyrical and learned, but brought down to earth by the real particulars of modern life and enlivened by punning, rapid-fire repartee. The reader recurrently experiences a pleasure like déjà vu, because his footing is in two places at the same time -- both in the present narrative and in Joyce’s prototype. Here again are the carnal appetites and pathos of an apparently soon-to-be-cuckolded Bloom. But now it is Leopold Bloom’s dead son Rudy who is reborn and relives his father’s drama. Dedalus is now Stephen’s son Thom who, after he has been fired from Harvard for drunkenness, first meets Bloom at Tim Finnegan’s wake. Not only Joyce’s characters but also each episode of his drama has been reimagined and reclothed in modern dress. In the Proteus episode a drunken, despairing Dedalus delivers a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy stumbling through Harvard Yard. In Lentz’s recasting of the Nausicca episode, the language of Rudy Bloom’s passionate, melancholy meditations is worthy of Joyce himself. In the Oxen of the Sun chapter, Mr. Lentz’s acrobatic literary clowning is more reminiscent of the Marx Brothers. After Dedalus gives Bloom LSD, the Circe episode becomes a boisterous, hallucinogenic rhapsody. And what of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy? It has been reforged as a splendid, down-to-earth, exquisitely moving prose poem delivered by Rudy Bloom’s ravishingly beautiful and deeply loyal wife Penelope. A very brief review can’t do justice to Mr. Lentz’s touching, funny, intricate, seemingly infinite variations on a theme by Joyce. But here’s the crux of the matter: this is a major work by a major writer -- and sophisticated readers will relish it.