A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)

The first novel by James Joyce took over 10 years to write. Published when Joyce was 34, it's not a big book. The time was occupied with poverty, drinking, revising, and drafting, not necessarily in that order. At one point it was giant. I read it in my 20s and reread it recently and both times I loved the first half and then felt this autobiographical artist-coming-of-age tale bog down as the main character Stephen Dedalus reaches his mid-teens, when religion swamps his education and fuels a provocative resentment. My favorite sections might be the transcriptions of their lessons on hell, which are vivid and just a little sick: "The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls." The lesson goes on like that for quite some time. Joyce's language all through is singing, vibrant, and concrete, not just on hell, but the narrative is often elliptical, forcing us to construct context and setting from clues. It lands hard on specific points in time, but then skips ahead with little warning beyond new chapters and line breaks. In a general way I share Joyce's resentments about the church, but I certainly don't share his experience. That's mainly what mires me down in the second half, as religion marks and distorts every aspect of his life and especially his education. No wonder he's so pissed off. I would also like to register another complaint about the Modern Library list, which ranks this as third-best novel in the 20th century behind only Ulysses and The Great Gatsby. In other words, two of the top three on the list are by Joyce. As it happens, Joyce is one of the few writers on this list who I think deserves two titles, as opposed to, say, Joseph Conrad (4), Evelyn Waugh (3), Ford Madox Ford (2), and other lapses. For that matter, Joyce doesn't deserve the three he gets—down at #77 we find Finnegans Wake of all things. Did all the voters really reread it to make sure it was as good as they remembered? That position, about #77, is where I think Portrait should go, a worthy and valuable book but not nearly as good as many it's ranked over (The Sound and the Fury, Catch-22, and The Grapes of Wrath, to name three in the top 10). Well, file all that under the agony of making lists. The religion aspect of Portrait might make it less interesting to me—in terms of liberating oneself from that particular morass I think Samuel Butler's Way of All Flesh is the better novel (or memoir), if decidedly 19th-century and not modern. But Joyce is such a good writer, and so modern, he can obscure things like that.

In case it's not at the library.

"The Boarding House" (1914)

Read story by James Joyce online.

I'm often surprised when I read James Joyce by how good he is. I should know better, but there it is. This story is a good example. It's a simple story, though shaded many subtle directions, about a marginally illicit affair between a man in his 30s staying at a boardinghouse and the 19-year-old daughter of the boardinghouse's mistress. It's truly short, under 10 printed pages, but packed with information. The backstory of Mrs. Mooney, for example, the boardinghouse mistress in question, is sketched out quickly and with useful detail. She's had a hard life and is not an easy woman. Daughter of a butcher, she married a butcher, who went bad after a while—drinking, mainly, and laziness. Mrs. Mooney got out of that marriage and opened a boardinghouse. Her attitude is evident in the cold way she calculates her prospects after she learns the boarder, a Mr. Doran, has been fooling around with her girl, Polly. This is all in Dublin, of course, coming from Joyce's collection of stories, Dubliners. Mrs. Mooney learns of the affair but does nothing at first. Polly knows she's watching but carries on anyway. "[Mrs. Mooney] dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat," Joyce writes. "She was sure she would win.... She felt sure she would win." The story is told in the third-person by an omniscient narrator. He not only knows everything, but he also know what are the most telling details, as his discussion of Mrs. Mooney's butchering background, or the violence of her older son. But mostly he spends time inside the head of Mrs. Mooney, sometimes Polly. Toward the end, he focuses on Mr. Doran, who is not exactly averse to marrying Polly—he knows he has sinned, he feels the guilt keenly—but his memories confirm to him that he has been manipulated by Polly into the position. It's just slightly comical, the whole thing, and not without its pathos. We understand better than Mr. Doran how he actually has been tricked. The outlook is not especially good for a happy marriage in the long term, but of such stuff are many marriages made. Thus, though it is close to appalling in many ways, it ultimately bends closer to comic than tragic. Another hapless bourgeoisie falls into the clutches of the grasping working class. What I like best about the story is how complete it is unto itself. It tells us everything we need to know about how this situation transpired, with no judgments whatsoever of anyone's motivation or character. It's an anecdote, really—a story might tell us a little more about how it turned out—and a funny one, sharply realized.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine

Dubliners by James Joyce