What one reviewer said about Ulysses by James Joyce, Erroll McDonald, Morris L. Ernst:
This is a brilliant novel. And it will find its salvation not because it is a triumph of form--which it is. Admittedly it packs intellectual poetry into every syllable, carefully constructed. But this means nothing today. Joyce was the only modernist who seemed to know that eventually the modernist form would fade and people would just wonder why The Wasteland is so damn hard to read. This book will find a salvation because it is more classical than any other book in the 20th century canon. And because it is a realist work before it is anything else.
Anyone who doubts that Joyce is a realist writer needs to take a glance at Dubliners. It is, more than likely, the realist tint of Ulysses that made upper crust elitists like Woolf dislike it. In his failed poet Stephen, Joyce offers a critique of the aesthete lifestyle. His hero, Bloom, is an impotent Jew suffering in sexual silence for the sake of his wife. The spiritual motivation of the book is a near-illiterate woman. There's little for the oversexed anti-semites of 1930s Paris to appreciate here.
Joyce wrote this book for his wife. It is his gift to her; fill in the details, ask yourself why that particular day, and you will see how Ulysses is perhaps the most profound love ode in the English language since "The Divine Comedy." It abolishes identity, language, politics, ethnicity and class in favor of a simple love poem. Read and be moved, but never say it is without content.
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