Re-Joyce ALL EDITIONS

Yet that Evel Knievel ambition has inspired essayist [Judith Kitchen]'s first novel, "The House on Eccles Road," a slim chronicle of a married couple's day in Dublin, Ohio. Kitchen's protagonists happen to be named Leo and Molly Bluhm - just like the marital pair at the hear...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNewsday
Main Author Celia Wren. Celia Wren is the managing editor at American Theater
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Long Island, N.Y Newsday LLC 15.09.2002
EditionCombined editions
Subjects
Bluhm, Molly
Joyce, James
Kitchen, Judith
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Summary:Yet that Evel Knievel ambition has inspired essayist [Judith Kitchen]'s first novel, "The House on Eccles Road," a slim chronicle of a married couple's day in Dublin, Ohio. Kitchen's protagonists happen to be named Leo and Molly Bluhm - just like the marital pair at the heart of "Ulysses," if you fudge the surname spelling - and the scars on their marriage mirror those endured by [James Joyce]'s menage: the death of a son; a dual tendency toward self-involved brooding; a mild alienation bred of utterly More interestingly, Joyce's formal pranks seem to have inspired Kitchen's most notable bouts of writing. In general, "Eccles Road" relays the rather pallid happenings of Dublin, Ohio, in straightforward streams of consciousness - principally those of Molly and (to a lesser extent) Leo, but sometimes also those of incidental characters, like the neighbor in the throes of giving birth (as Mrs. Purefoy does in "Ulysses"). At a couple of points, however, the style waxes more playful, as in the section All the same, it's hard to be too pessimistic about a writer who's ambitious and nervy enough to rip off James Joyce. And, since Joyce himself stole from Homer, Kitchen's novel does impart a gratifying sense that one has plunged into a meta-literary current that started coursing a few millennia ago. In any case, one hardly wants to be the kind of philistine who no doubt muttered, as Joyce scribbled away at [Leopold Bloom]'s adventures: "Why on earth do we need another version of the 'Odyssey'?"