Many of us have had a variety of uncles, aunts, professors, teachers, colleagues, and friends who teach, mentor, or inspire us during our time on earth. One of those special people in my life recently gifted me a book about a journey and complicated relationships. The gift came just as I was leaving on an extended voyage of my own with family members and friends old and new in places that were far from home.

Whether the timing was intentional or simply serendipitous, travel was the perfect backdrop to read and ponder what one reviewer calls a “stellar contribution” to the genre of memoirs about reading.

An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic (2018) by Daniel Mendelsohn is a brilliant combination of memoir and literary exploration that begins when the author’s father, eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn, decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College. Jay is a retired research scientist and professor who adheres to the unbending rules of mathematics. Daniel has “always been made nervous by arithmetic and geometries and quadratics, unforgiving systems that allow for no shadings or embellishments, no evasions or lies.” So it is not surprising that early in the course, the father and son have a public disagreement in class over the nature of Odysseus. Was he a hero or a self-pitying liar? Jay, in his Long Island accent, makes his point loudly, in front of the seminar students.

“I don’t know why he’s supposed to be such a haihhro,” he says. “He cheats on his wife, he sleeps with Calypso. He loses all of his men, so he’s a lousy general. He’s depressed, he whines. He sits there and wants to die.”

It is the beauty and genius of this book that Daniel can hear his father’s disagreement; listen to how his seminar students react to father, son, and the text; and lead everyone to a far deeper understanding of the epic poem. After the semester ends father and son take a Mediterranean cruise, retracing the mythical journeys of Odysseus, where another side of Jay is revealed. Like Odysseus and perhaps most of us, he is polytropos: “many-sided” or “much-turning.”

An Odyssey is also a courageous work on Daniel’s part. He is the public intellectual and the “expert” in the classics, yet he is willing to admit that the perspective his difficult father brings to the class discussions helps deepen and sometimes even change how he interprets Homer’s epic. Late in the book Daniel recounts a long-ago conversation with a mentor as he was stuck in the writing of his dissertation. It is a confession lesser writers might have excluded:

“Your problem is that you see everything that doesn’t fit your theory as a problem, instead of as an opportunity to enlarge your thinking, to come up with a better theory. You’re so fixated on your own ideas that you don’t see what’s right in front of your face.”

Homer’s Odyssey—which the author often characterizes in the phrase “expect the unexpected”—is many things. Daniel works through most of these as he recounts his interactions with Jay in class, childhood family memories, his own growth as an individual and son with a challenging father, and the insights of his undergraduates. Scholar Emily Wilson, whose much-praised translation of The Odyssey has now moved much higher in my TBR pile, identifies many of these elements of Homer’s epic in an insightful review of Mendelsohn’s book for The Guardian. Do we have a single “true” identity? Can or should people ever be self-sufficient? Is it possible to ever really know another person? The book also explores, Wilson notes, how stories and shared memories help people to form deep connections with one another across time.

A student’s comment near the end of the class sticks in Daniel’s mind.

“I wonder,” [the student asked,] “if you think we could say it’s a story about listening? About how your own perspective affects how you hear things? I mean, the real problem in this story is that from the very start Polyphemus hears what he wants to hear.”

An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic does not require that one be a classics scholar, or even to have read Homer’s poem; but it does provide what one reviewer calls “a rich introduction or reintroduction.” Most importantly Daniel Mendelsohn has produced a moving and insightful book that doesn’t require a trip around the globe to absorb its meaning. Dwight Garner’s review in the New York Times suggests that Daniel has “written a book that’s accessible to nearly any curious reader.”

“In her memoir ‘Slow Days, Fast Company,’ Eve Babitz remarks that ‘early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.’

For Homer, that person is Daniel Mendelsohn, and this blood-warm book.”

An Odyssey ends with Jay’s death, which ties beginning and end together. In his introduction (or Proem) Daniel mentions an especially touching moment that will come on the Odyssey cruise when father and son visit “the desolate spot on the Campanian coast near Naples that, the ancients believed, was the entrance to Hades, the Land of the Dead.” It was another unexpected stop on Odysseus’ journey home . . .

“but perhaps not so unexpected because, after all, we must settle our accounts with the dead before we can get on with our living.”

Daniel, by examining their life together and ending this memoir with Jay’s death, is making his own peace with the past. It is a beautiful and thoughtful journey.

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of ruins at Lindos by DJB