Ulysses Nearly Broke Me and I Loved It Anyway

A Day, an Ad Salesman, and Basically No Plot

Here’s the entire premise: it’s June 16, 1904, in Dublin, and Leopold Bloom, a mild-mannered ad canvasser, wanders around the city for a day while his wife Molly plans to sleep with another man that afternoon and he sort of knows it and does nothing about it. Meanwhile Stephen Dedalus, the moody young intellectual from Joyce’s earlier novel, mopes around being brilliant and insufferable. Their paths cross late in the book in a way that is touching and also kind of anticlimactic, which feels correct for this book.

That’s it. That’s the plot. Joyce mapped it loosely onto Homer’s Odyssey, so Bloom is Ulysses wandering home, Molly is Penelope, Stephen is Telemachus, and every chapter riffs on an episode from the epic if you squint. You do not need to know the Odyssey to read this. You do need patience, because nothing here moves like a normal novel. There’s no rising action. There’s a man buying a kidney for breakfast, worrying about his daughter, grieving his dead son, masturbating on a beach while watching a girl named Gerty MacDowell, attending a funeral, getting into a bar fight, and going to a maternity hospital where the prose itself ages through centuries of English literary style over the course of one chapter. Look, I’m not exaggerating that last part. It’s genuinely one of the strangest technical stunts I’ve ever read.

The Genius Parts and the Parts I Wanted to Throw Across the Room

Here’s the thing about Ulysses: it is not one book, it is about eighteen different experiments stapled into a spine, and they are wildly uneven in how much they reward you.

When it’s good, it’s some of the best prose I’ve ever encountered. “Calypso,” the chapter where we first meet Bloom making breakfast and heading to the outhouse with a newspaper, is warm and funny and strange in a way that made me actually like this man before I understood a word of the harder stuff coming later. “Hades,” the funeral chapter, has this quiet, devastating undertow about mortality that sneaks up on you between jokes about coffins. And Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy, forty-some pages with almost no punctuation, her mind sliding between memory and desire and grievance and that famous final yes, is one of the most alive pieces of writing about a woman’s interior life that existed at the time, written by a man, in 1922, which still kind of stuns me.

Now the criticism, because I promised myself I’d actually give you one. “Oxen of the Sun” and “Circe” nearly ended me. “Oxen” is Joyce showing off, marching through pastiches of English prose styles from Anglo-Saxon to Victorian slang, and unless you are a scholar of literary history it reads like static. I don’t care how clever the conceit is, if I need three footnotes per paragraph to know what’s happening, the book has stopped talking to me and started talking to itself. “Circe” is a hallucinatory play-script fever dream that runs for over a hundred pages and I finished it with almost no idea what had actually occurred versus what was imagined. Some people call that the point. I call it, at times, a slog dressed up as a masterpiece.

A tangent: I read most of this during a genuinely miserable stretch, subletting a tiny apartment in a city where I didn’t know anyone yet, and I’d read ten pages a night with a glass of wine and a Joyce guidebook open on my phone like a cheat sheet during a final exam. That’s not how you’re supposed to read a novel. But it’s honestly how I suspect most people who finish this book actually do it, alone, slightly embarrassed, googling what a “collector of prepuces” means in chapter fourteen.

Am I sure I even liked it, or did I just want to be the kind of person who finished it? I’ve asked myself that more than once. I think the honest answer is both. If you want to try it yourself, here’s a copy worth picking up, ideally one with annotations, because going in raw is an act of either bravery or masochism.

Ulysses isn’t a story you read so much as a mind you agree to live inside for a while, and it does not care whether you’re comfortable there.

About James Joyce

Joyce was born in Dublin in 1882 to a large, chaotic, increasingly broke Catholic family, and he spent most of his adult life writing obsessively about the one city he could barely stand to live in, from self-imposed exile in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris. He had famously terrible eyesight, underwent something like a dozen eye surgeries, and reportedly dictated parts of Finnegans Wake to Samuel Beckett while half blind. He was broke for most of his career, dependent on patrons and his brother’s charity, and lived just long enough to see Ulysses go from banned obscenity to modern classic. He died in 1941 in Zurich, still arguing, by most accounts, about commas.

If This Wrecked You (Or Wrecked You in a Different Way), Read These Next

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, another single day, another wandering consciousness, but shorter and gentler on your patience. To the Lighthouse, also Woolf, for stream of consciousness that actually lets you breathe. Dubliners, Joyce’s own earlier short story collection, for the same Dublin obsession in doses that won’t require a map. And if you want the maximalist hangover cure, try Infinite Jest, which borrows some of that same “the book is also about how hard the book is” energy.

For your book club

1. Does Bloom’s passivity about Molly’s affair make him sympathetic or frustrating, and did your opinion of him change by the end?
2. Which chapter’s style (the newspaper headlines, the play script, the prose evolution in “Oxen of the Sun”) worked for you, and which one lost you completely?
3. Is Molly’s final soliloquy a genuine act of empathy from Joyce, or is it still a man’s fantasy of what a woman thinks about?
4. Do you think Ulysses earns its reputation as the greatest novel in English, or is that reputation partly a self-perpetuating academic myth?
5. Would you have finished this without outside help (guides, annotations, discussion groups), and does needing that help change how you feel about the book’s value?