The Necessary Fiction: Life with James Joyce's "Ulysses," by Michael Groden

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Necessary Fiction: Life with James Joyce's "Ulysses," by Michael Groden Jonathan Goldman (bio) THE NECESSARY FICTION: LIFE WITH JAMES JOYCE'S "ULYSSES," by Michael Groden. Brighton, England: Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2019. xi + 276 pp. £65.00. Editor's Note: this review was composed and sent to the JJQ before the passing of Michael Groden, to whom we will pay tribute in a forthcoming issue. We are printing the piece as submitted, without edits reflecting the loss of the author and critic. Michael Groden's The Necessary Fiction carves out a distinct niche within Joyce studies, which is fitting, since Groden has done the same. The book chronicles the author's personal and professional development alongside his affective engagement with Ulysses over half a century as well as his critical assessment of the novel as a humane, empathetic work. Ulysses functions as a prism through which Groden views his memories and reckons with his personal struggles; in return, his lived experience shapes his understanding of Joyce. Acknowledging the mash-up nature of The Necessary Fiction, Groden mulls over possible descriptors, including "bibliomemoir" and "shelfie" (13), but he takes a wider scope than these terms suggest. He offers, for example, a fifty-year overview of Joyce's legacy and Joyce scholarship, with special attention to genetic criticism. Addressing a less specialized audience, Groden reflects, like the best memoirists, on memory, writing, and the authorial subject. Novice Joyce readers are assumed, as Groden includes a guide to Ulysses' episodes. The Necessary Fiction moonlights as a love story, which is most significant to Groden: he signals that the book is a valentine to the poet Molly Peacock, just as Ulysses is Joyce's tribute to Nora Barnacle. Like a true comedy, such as Ulysses, the book ends with a marriage– not a wedding, but a marriage–that of Peacock and Groden, which has spanned the last three decades. All of this is rendered with humility and humor and a sometimes unnerving candor. Groden explains: "I can't try to answer my questions about Ulysses' strong appeal to me without opening the doors on my own privacy to look at the rough draft of myself in progress" (13). This openness underpins the depictions of family and romantic spheres, his mental and physical health crises, and the self-assessment of his development as a person. The Necessary Fiction moves chronologically through Groden's life and career, frequently digressing to relate its narrative to Ulysses, and occasionally to Joyce's biography. Groden tells of his pedestrian, middle-class, secular Jewish upbringing in an industrial, economically depressed Buffalo, New York, with himself an exceptionally James Joyce Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 4 (Summer 2021), pp. 557-588. Copyright © for the JJQ, University of Tulsa, 2021. All rights to reproduction in any form are reserved. [End Page 557] shy youth, studious, fascinated with numbers, patterns, and hidden order (which, he notes, conditions him for manuscript study). The fraught relationships with his parents he compares to portrayals of mothers and fathers in Ulysses that he would absorb years later, lingering to elaborate on his lifelong admiration for Leopold Bloom, for Joyce's construction of a compassionate and empathetic father, husband, and community member. In high school, Groden meets Peacock, a moment he likens to his first exposure to Ulysses, triangulating their encounter through the legend of Joyce's first date with Barnacle, the Ulysses use of the song "When First I Saw That Form Endearing" (85), and Beatles lyrics.1 (The book is peppered with Beatles and other rock references.) The romance, erotic exploration, and eventual breakup with Peacock drastically expand his worldview. They date through their first year of university, by which point Groden has discovered Joyce. Now the memoir takes off. Groden first opens Ulysses in his first semester at Dartmouth College, as the first reading assignment of his first literature class, taught by Peter Bien. He is "smitten" (8), "infatuated" (34), and, two years later, a committed English major; two years after that, he applies to graduate school. Alongside this history, Groden depicts his romantic travails, soon arriving at Sally (last name not given). The two marry, though not for long, and for...