I readily admit I wasn’t expecting too much from this little green paperback about James Joyce and his fiction; it’s a booklet of only 89 pages after all, plus end material, and it’s so small I could easily cart it about in my pocket and read it here and there at brief and intermittent interludes during a recent trip out of state. I was therefore surprised and pleasantly affected by John Gross’s sly and efficacious, even charming, style.
This is merely one installment from a popular 1970s series of publications on “Modern Masters”: study guides focused on writers and thinkers upon whom college students might be likely to be tested. This is a kind of precursor to more recent Notes of the Cliff or Spark variety, you might say, and in general that more ancient series is of a more refined and thoughtful order than what was to follow in ensuing decades, perhaps reflective of an era in which students were somewhat more concerned with learning for its own sake than simply and exclusively with passing tests.
In the first half of the book or so Gross provides us more with his own impressions of Joyce than with a tick-tock biography, painting us a non-chronological montage of the artist’s personality. Further on he does begin to take on Joyce’s artistic works in chronological order, and now this little reflective book grows a bit more formulaic, as we pass from Dubliners to Portrait to Ulysses and finally to Finnegans Wake, with the various lesser works included at their proper places. It seems to me that because Gross’s booklet is so short he is less successful here, but only because he lacks the space to tell his tale properly.
Still, this little guide booklet is, I think, a generally excellent one for ruminative undergraduates, perhaps, who are about to begin exploring Joyce’s infinitely complex world. Or, I might add, it is a friendly companion for those who are already familiar with Joyce, who only want a little light reading to carry with them on their next vacation.
Tagged: James Joyce
