Perhaps the most striking aspect—at least initially—of Bloomsday: The Bostoniad is the decidedly striking parallels to Joyce’s Ulysses. These parallels are, of course, wholly intentional and justified in that Bloomsday is meant to be both a continuation and re-imagination of its predecessor. Clearly, it is a bold undertaking, and admittedly, as someone who admires Joyce and delights in Ulysses, I had my misgivings about such an enterprise. However, to put it plainly, author David B. Lentz pulls it off unequivocally with no small amount of flair.
Readers who are familiar with Joyce’s work will find the parallels between Ulysses and Bloomsday arresting at times—almost to the point of distraction—but will no doubt chuckle and even hee-haw at the ingenuity of the author. (For example, the Citizen throws bottles of beer at an escaping Bloom instead of a biscuit tin). However, after the first few chapters, the parallels become simply pleasing enhancements and the story of Rudy Bloom and Thomas Dedalus takes command of the reader’s imagination on its own terms.
The plot of Bloomsday resembles that of Ulysses only superficially. Bloomsday offers some notable variations, especially those pertaining to the surprising paternity of Bloom and Dedalus. Another important variation is both Bloom and Dedalus lose their jobs on the morning of June 16th, although as the day wears on, Dedalus unwittingly picks up the very copywriting job which Rudy Bloom has earlier lost. This is a significant in that it informs one of the major themes of Bloomsday—capitalist greed in a society where one’s value is measured by his/her net worth. The setting, too, is important to this theme: Beantown, the Dublin of America. The sense of alienation that Rudy Bloom feels in Beantown has nothing to do with his being Jewish (he has converted to Christianity) as Leopold Bloom’s sense of alienation in the Dublin of Ulysses does, but stems from the fact that he is jobless in a rampantly (rabidly) capitalist society. In fact, consuming is at the heart of nearly everything Rudy Bloom and Thomas Dedalus do throughout their wanderings in the day and night duration of Bloomsday, and money facilitates that consumption. However, the plain fact that Rudy Bloom has lost his job is a constant source of tension for Bloom, as well as the reader. Also at the back of Rudy Bloom’s mind is his wife Penelope’s supposed intimate rendezvous with Blaine Boylston, womanizer, and the publisher of her poems. Like Leopold Bloom, Rudy is reluctant to go home—to give up his wandering—for fear of what he believes he will find there. Also like Leopold Bloom, Rudy is guilty of his own romantic dalliances. (He writes suggestive letters to Maddy Dunne and lusts after Margaret Breen.) And in this way, Lentz manages to make Rudy Bloom as lovable and yet as flawed a character as Joyce’s Leopold Bloom.
Thomas Dedalus’s predicament is just the opposite of Rudy Bloom’s. Having taken Bloom’s copywriting job, Dedalus now finds himself in a position to reap the benefits of living in a capitalist society. Like Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, Thomas’s turmoil stems from an unrealized sense of identity. In short, he is the artist who has sold his proverbial soul and along with it, his sense of self. Forced from the hallowed halls of academe, he now braces himself for a world of dining and drinking with wealthy clients who wouldn't know Prada from Proust. And in this way does he, the artist, “suffer” for his art.
In Bloomsday, Lentz has written a novel very much in the style of Joyce, replete with wit and wordplay, inner monologues, and dialogues based on rapid-fire repartee. (When Margaret Breen tells Bloom that the special of the day is “scrod,” he replies: “You rarely hear that word in the pluperfect subjunctive.”) It also comes loaded with both literary and popular allusions with a decidedly American bent. Like Ulysses, Bloomsday is a challenging but ultimately rewarding book. It demands to be savored and begs to be studied, for inevitably there is much that is missed in the first pass. At the same time, it is a highly entertaining book that can be enjoyed simply on the merits of Lentz’s remarkable command of the language and his ability to turn a phrase. In this sense, then, it really is about the journey and not the destination. -- Gary Anderson, Canadian Author of "Animal Magnet", as Posted on Goodreads ( )