Daniel Mendelsohn is a classics scholar, a translator, a memoirist and a quick-witted literary and television critic. The idea of reading his account of being trapped on a theme cruise — the theme is Homer’s “Odyssey” — is an attractive one.
There’s an early scene in Mendelsohn’s new book, “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic,” in which Daniel, a natty gay man, looks on in horror as Jay buttons himself into a shiny brown shirt.
These sentences — well made, revealing and funny — are typical of Mendelsohn’s book. What catches you off guard about this memoir is how moving it is. It has many complicated things to say not only about Homer’s epic poem but about fathers and sons.
If you have not read the “Odyssey,” or have not read it since you were 30 pounds lighter and regularly wore sandals, this is a rich introduction or reintroduction. Mendelsohn makes Homer’s epic shine in your mind.
a) It is a classroom drama, a bit like Alan Bennett’s play “The History Boys” or the movie “Dead Poets Society,” in that it recalls what happened when Jay decided to sit in on the author’s undergraduate seminar on the “Odyssey” at Bard College.
b) It is travel writing. Father and son decide to take the cruise shortly after the completion of the seminar at Bard.
c) It is a work of biographical memoir that investigates the circumstances of Jay’s life.
d) It is a work of literary criticism. Homer’s hero, Odysseus, employed the trick of the Trojan horse. Mendelsohn, similarly, smuggles his moral and textual ideas past you when you are distracted by the other things he’s doing.
Jay is a retired research scientist and an exacting man. He prizes difficulty and durability. He and the author drifted apart for many years, beginning when Daniel was in high school. The son felt he was too “mushy and imprecise” to please his father.
Daniel found a series of surrogate fathers and mentors; they were often charismatic gay teachers. It was only later in life that Daniel and Jay reconnected.
The scenes of Jay at Bard, in his son’s classroom, are vivid. He wears Old Spice cologne and white baggy sweaters and occasionally breaks into song.
Jay embarrasses his son. But the students love him. And Daniel begins to come around. This book does not bake its lessons up into a tidy platter of macaroons, but they are there nonetheless.
Homer composed the “Odyssey” in dactylic hexameter, the six-beat meter that gives the poem its elevated oom-pah-pah, oom-pah-pah cadence. Mendelsohn’s cadences in “An Odyssey” are softer and fonder, but there’s a brisk undercurrent. You feel you’re reading the literary equivalent of a Rodgers and Hart song.
Despite my admiration for Mendelsohn’s writing, over the years I have occasionally rolled my eyes while beginning to read one of his essays. His classical erudition can be too much with him. You get the sense that, were he sent to review an Olive Garden, he would remark, in his opening paragraph, that the bread sticks reminded him of the oars on a trireme.
I was impressed, then, by how lightly yet superbly he wears his learning in “An Odyssey.” He evokes again and again the joys of academic work.
For Homer, that person is Daniel Mendelsohn, and this blood-warm book.
306 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.