Book Review: An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic

Daniel Mendelsohn provides an erudite criticism of Homer’s Odyssey and a masterful telling of family history in one of the books of the year.

“A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” This is the opening line of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. When I first read Greene as a teenager, and for a long time thereafter, this statement made sense: After all, there’s no point of singularity to stories. It’s the author who selects the point from which to jump-start his story; and from that point he can sidle either ways in time, to cover the past and the future as befitting his purposes. In other words, an author bestows a story with the opening scene; a story on its own accord doesn’t have one.

Reading Homer’s Odyssey many years later was further proof of the truth in Greene’s declarative. For instead of beginning with Odysseus, as one would expect, with his quest to return home and his adventures and heroics, Homer opens with the struggles of the sad, daydreaming, helpless Telemachus, Odysseus’ son. For the next four Books the narrative stays with Telemachus. Only then, when he has made us pregnant with yearning, do we get the first glimpse of the hero: forlornly idling his time on an island in the clutches of the beautiful nymph Calypso. Instead of narrating Odysseus’s tale from the very outset, Homer had dithered and chosen to open with a long tale of the naive boy. Despite his obvious privilege as the author, I’d no doubt then that Homer, being the first practitioner of the epic, had begun the Odyssey if not badly then randomly.

Now, after reading An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, I have a problem with one word in Greene’s above quoted line: arbitrary. When the author writes about “Homer’s decision to obscure and blur and postpone our view of the epic’s main character is designed to pique our curiosity about the shadowy figure, who, in these crucial first pages, seems to lurk at the far edges of his own story,” it’s hard not to believe him that the epic could have started just so; that this epic — and, for that matter, any great story — did not start arbitrarily; that there is intelligence and design behind the subversion of the audience’s expectation. That I believed it so readily, banishing my age-old tussle with Telemachus and his timid ways, was down to the uniquely persuasive powers of its professor: Daniel Mendelsohn.

Mendelsohn is the foremost literary critic in the English language. His essays, ranging from pop culture to classics, have a levitating yet engrossing effect on the reader. Deeply informative yet never didactic, he belongs to that rare breed of writers whose writings are compulsory reading, whether it’s an essay on Ex Machina or the Roman Emperor Augustus. His essays rarely seem confined to the subject they address; they dive and dip into deeper waters of knowledge and wisdom. Reading Mendelsohn is education.

An Odyssey starts with an eight-page summary of the book that nutshells all he has to cover; a syllabus of sorts for the subject at hand. In here he informs us about the spring semester in which he taught a seminar on the Odyssey; about his father insisting on sitting in on those classes; about the Mediterranean cruise they undertook to retrace the mythical route of Odysseus; about his father’s fall in a parking lot, his declining health, and the brief period of recovery during which he seemed to be back to his “old self.” A strange way to begin a book: by providing readers a capsule account of the events that you expect to usually unfold gradually, the author appears to dilute every bit of surprise and give away too much too early.

But — again — this is how it has to be. His ticking off of the major events so early in the book is rooted in his knowledge of the classics, the governing mechanics and the harder skill of applying them to great effect. “All classical epics begin with what scholars call a proem: the introductory lines that announce to the audience what the epic is about — what will be the scope of its action, the identities of its characters, the nature of its themes.” From this we are introduced to the seven-line proem of the Iliad and the first ten (or as some debate twenty-one) lines that make the proem of the Odyssey. The summary, then, is the proem, so to speak, to his epic. This is, more crucially, the first instance of Mendelsohn’s use of the Odyssey model to structure his own work.

What Daniel Mendelsohn has delivered in An Odyssey is less a memoir and more an exhaustive double-profile of his father and himself. In and around their tales, like a golden thread embellishing a silk cloth, lie passages of commentary on Homer’s epic. The result is a book full of rich discussions on the text and a moving discovery of a father-son relationship. The seminar serves as the setting for learned debates; the father’s attendance provides Mendelsohn the close (and lengthy) association to know him. What it leads to is a delicious double-helping of juicy stories — some factual, others mythical; many enriching, others educational; some that smooth out differences, others that connect the dots. In the able hands of Mendelsohn, they are all equally delectable.

Jay Mendelsohn, Daniel’s father, is critical, acerbic and reticent. His blunt but earnest quibbles with his son, often regarding what he thinks to be an Odysseus unworthy of a hero’s worship — “I just don’t see what he’s supposed to be such a great hero!” — breaks the ice and lightens the mood of the class. Throughout the course, he is a pesky presence at the classroom, thrusting his hand in the air and aiming one more inquiring quip at the hero’s God-aided deeds. The students taking the course, perked by the old man’s evisceration, bring their own novel interpretations to the text. The Classicist is often at odds with the students’ perspectives. Mendelsohn uses these encounters to weave loops of ring compositions, much like Homer, by taking a point under discussion to digress and insert a note on Greek and Latin words, an anecdote about his father or his teachers, or feed us on the history behind the composition of the epics. The most intriguing episodes of the Odyssey act as the launchpad to a) share his understanding of the symbolism inherent in the text and urge the students to come up with their own views; and b) analyze his father’s responses in the light of his personal history, by remembering an incident from his life that closely parallels some episode from the Odyssey. In the early pages, the commentary on the Odyssey dominates the book, with the picture of Jay Mendelsohn slowly taking shape through brief reminiscences. But as the book proceeds, Jay appears in the foreground, with every new account of his life bearing greater gravity, and his opinions that seemed so far continually dismissive now mellowed and meaningful. This braiding of the twin strands of narrative — overlapping personal history and criticism — follows the rhythms and techniques of the Odyssey itself, giving the book an awe-inspiring congruity with the epic. Imagine taking two sets of jumbled jigsaw pieces and constructing one cogent jigsaw out of them.

The book’s truly satisfying moments are those in which our own reading of the Odyssey’s many intriguing scenes converge with perspectives of the students’ — which invariably differ from that of Mendelsohn’s. For instance, during a session covering Odysseus’s narration of his adventures to the Phaeacians, in Book 9–12, one of the students remarks on the similarities between the Calypso and Circe stories, deftly hinting that Odysseus, the trickster and teller of tall tales that he is, is indeed fudging his adventures, dramatizing what actually occurred to concoct multiple tales out of one true event. Mendelsohn, armed with his close readings of the classics, is not convinced, leading to a student-teacher moment of friction. The fracas rattles Mendelsohn into consulting his own teacher of thirty years ago. In the meantime, he can’t help thinking if through Odysseus’s sensationalized tales Homer, never short of embedding profound meanings between his lines, had blurred the lines between fact and fiction. And although Mendelsohn is in the end right to defend the authenticity of Odysseus’s tale of meeting with Circe, it raises a new question: Do we always hear what we want to listen, blocking everything that tends to contradict our judgement?

To read this book is to gain a fresh competency in the epic. Mendelsohn approaches the text from various new angles, and, if you’ve a basic grounding in Homer, you’re bound to come off more deeply informed. For instance, one can detect the tension between Menelaus and Helen during their retelling of the battle of Troy (when Telemachus visits them in Book 4); that although a formerly unfaithful wife is back with her husband — and happy — the ugly conflict of the past is raging beneath the veneer of peace. But it is Mendelsohn who directs our attention to the true importance of this scene: This is the first time Telemachus, who has grown up without his father by him, is meeting a married couple; he points out that “he is learning about marriage.”

Of the 12110 lines of the Odyssey, the passage that moved me the most and made me weep, the lines that I go back to repeatedly, are the lines from the Underground, where Odysseus’s ghost-mother gives him the tidings of Ithaca.

But no man takes your honored place. Telemakhos

has care of all your garden plots and fields,

and holds the public honor of a magistrate,

feasting and being feasted. But your father

is country bound and comes to town no more.

He owns no bedding, rugs, or fleecy mantles,

but lies down, winter nights, among the slaves,

rolled in old cloaks for cover, near the embers.

Or when the heat comes at the end of summer,

The falled leaves, all round his vineyard plot,

heaped into windrows, make his lowly bed.

He lies now even so, with aching heart,

and longs for your return, while age comes on him.

So I, too, pined away, so doom befell me,

not that the keen-eyed huntress with their shafts

had marked me down and shot to kill me; not

that illness overtook me — no true illness

wasting the body to undo the spirit;

only my loneliness for you, Odysseus,

for your kind heart and counsel, gentle Odysseus,

took my own life away.

While Penelope fends off her Suitors and Telemachus goes to the sea to scour news of his father, the aged parents of Odysseus, without the vigor of youth to sustain their hope, despair in their loneliness. This inaction and withering, the draining of hope and, finally, life itself, is in stark contrast to the ever-mobile Odysseus, who still longs and believes, shunning immortality in favor of a return to his homeland. Also, the Odyssey, with its running theme of a son in search of his father, of Odysseus’ reunion with his own father in the end, diverts here to bring us an instance of a mother’s love and loss.

Mendelsohn deals only cursorily with this passage, more eager to focus on Odysseus’s dialogue with Achilles instead. Which, if anything, only goes to show the multitude of features and possibilities that open up for scrutiny on the close reading of the text. In fact, this abundance of interpretations largely defines the “epic,” a term that, in these days of multi-million-dollar franchises and gory money-making tomes of pulp, gets bandied about lazily and erroneously. The perspectives that the Odyssey invites and the barrage of arguments — scholarly or juvenile (which are no less interesting) — that it can absorb are some of the reasons for its enduring popularity, reasons why it’s read, assimilated and debated over. One glance over the themes it tackles is enough to make the mind boggle — marriage, family, identity, recognition, disguise, education, loyalty, sacrifice….

Just like the Odyssey, Mendelsohn’s book picks up its pace during the later stages— powered, most singly, by Jay Mendelsohn’s life story, which, as Daniel learns, has hardly been dull. Layers slide over with time to reveal details tender and admirable, and a son who never quite “knew” his father comes to know him in all his flaws and finesse. (Another one of the book’s many thematic links with the Odyssey.) Just like “Homer’s plot and Odysseus’ plotting become inseparable” in the final dozen Books, so too does the Mendelsohns’ personal lives come together into a family saga during the final pages. Mendelsohn builds the events of the deeper discovery of his father around the reunion of Odysseus and Telemachus. Illuminating on the lines of the Odyssey — like the boar-hunt episode in which Odysseus gets the scar — provide him the framework to flashback to his father’s childhood, which helps to shed light on the man’s many idiosyncratic traits. A father averse to physical demonstration of affection, a father easily irked by his son’s clumsy math, a father who joined the army so he could get higher education, a father with rare moments of softness heaped on obscure strangers, a father who prized pain and cleaved to the notion of hard work and perseverance as the just way to achievement. More tellingly, profoundly paralleling the Odyssey: a father who built a special bed, like Odysseus; a father whose absence led to Daniel looking for alternatives, for mentors, like Telemachus; a father who loved his wife as dearly as he first met her sixty-five years ago.

There is a mastery in the way Mendelsohn makes the connections. Seamlessly and expertly he picks apart and links back the events — both from life and the Odyssey — to elucidate their significance. He compels us into believing that events, even literary ones, are anything but arbitrary. The connections he makes are multi-fold but neatly curlicued at the end to leave us with the major theme of the passage ringing in our heads. He embeds stories within stories to go back and forth in time, to switch from the text to real life. Like a great teacher, he makes us fall in love with the classics. His own love and passion rubs off on us. “For the best teacher is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure, too, so that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him.” The most enduring connection he forges by the end might well be that of a teacher and student.

My heavily annotated book of Professor Mendelsohn vaguely resembles the barely un-underlined copy of Fitzgerald’s translation of the epic. If not for the great seminar on the epic that this book certainly is, then for that dramatic ending, with the virtues of family echoing in its every word, at least, An Odyssey climaxes into a modern classic.