Set at Random: The Book that Wouldn't Lie Down by Declan Dunne

Abstract

Reviewed by: Set at Random: The Book that Wouldn't Lie Down by Declan Dunne Mason Whitehorn Powell (bio) SET AT RANDOM: THE BOOK THAT WOULDN'T LIE DOWN, by Declan Dunne. CreateSpace: Self-Published, 2018. 287 pp. $12.00. I would like to know what Declan Dunne set out to say by writing Set at Random. His novel meanders a bit alongside its protagonist, Set Wright, beginning in Pendleton, Texas, during the "'29 cotton-picking season'" (1). This specific seasonal detail, like many others, does not color the novel so much as it hangs undeveloped. Intriguing subject matter and an engaging plot struggle to develop a clear path. What begins as a bildungsroman, where bankers take farmhouses from hapless families, develops into a battle against the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice's attempt to censor James Joyce's Ulysses. Wright relocates to New York City, where he is taken under the wing of an Irish-American family, the Finnegans, and finds himself working for Bennett Cerf and Donald Knopfler of Random House and [End Page 376] their attorney Morris Ernst.1 Thus: Set (works) at Random (House), filing paperwork for the imminent court case—United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—and is eventually sent to Paris to meet with the Joyces and their coterie as the verdict is reached. Dunne's story searches for a sense of purpose and direction without clear realization, which mirrors the nature and execution of its protagonist's journey. Dunne makes it overtly clear that this is a novel of parallelism: if Wright, with his Texas mettle, did not envision the foreclosing banker and artistic censor as one and the same, then his evolution from admitted ignorance to the center of the Joycean controversy by happenstance would not have occurred. "Make sure they're heard—the people they're trying to silence," a mentor says to Wright early in the text in Texas (21). The repetition of circumstance and patterns is not simply a trick in the Ulysses playbook appropriated by Dunne but rather a surface-level theme of which Wright becomes consciously aware, and it consistently pops up in dialogue from beginning to end. Here are examples: "You remind me of Joyce." "Who's she?" [Wright asks, now in New York City]. "James Joyce. His book, Ulysses, takes a lot from Homer's Odyssey. So people read one and refer to the other trying to find connections or where Joyce has reflected the story in Ulysses. That's if they can get their hands on a copy of Ulysses. You have found, Set, at an early age that life repeats itself in strange ways. I think you might have the mind of an artist." "I don't know about that, Mr. Finnegan. What do you mean, if they can get their hands on a copy of Ulysses? Is it nearly sold out?" "No," Mr. Finnegan answered. "It's banned." "You mean they won't let him talk?" (42) A question worth asking is whether the novel is more about the battle for publication rights to Joyce's book or the agency of its protagonist's life. Wright seems to be at the mercy of greater cosmic forces that guide him, and whether this is coincidence or randomness, it really is up to the author. If Wright was removed from the world Dunne created, Joyce's novel would become unbanned anyway. His presence, however, highlights the reality of both small and large figures who advocated for Joyce and fought to defend Ulysses. Even if the novel is heavy-handed, it does provide a unique perspective on the ontological divide between reality and fiction: that words and ideas, like people, must be protected when threatened. How Dunne goes about this is not seamless and epic, as in Ulysses, yet the author's prose is clear and his ideas straightforward. The novel is an engaging read if approached with an expectation that it does not shed new light on Joycean scholarship but instead refracts it through the eyes of a boy from Texas on a white-knight mission. [End Page 377] Set at Random lacks the sensuousness, mental entanglement, and iconoclasm that...