The House of Ulysses Book

Is it a novel? The House of Ulysses is labeled a novel on the cover and title page of my edition. I'm not sure it is, though. There's little story except that of the Joyce novel itself. The only narrative movement is that which follows the course of the novel famously paralleling the Odyssey. There are characters: a professor named Ludwig Jones, a mysterious Macintosh man who seems to correspond to the mystery man of Dublin on that first Bloomsday, except this one carries a Macintosh computer, a mature reader, a young woman, an old critic, and a museum guide. We follow these characters as they walk through the Martello Tower, famous as the site of the opening chapter of Ulysses and now the site of Dublin's James Joyce Museum. As The House of Ulysses progresses, the characters stroll from point to point in the museum, each exhibit corresponding to a chapter of Ulysses. The novel is made up of a detailed summary of each chapter of the novel as the characters discuss it, followed by sections called "Passageways" which, as the word suggests, offer additional information indicating ways of understanding. Often the Rios chapter will be written in the same style as the Joyce chapter. Whatever it is, it's fun. And it's interesting from first page to last. The language is Joycean, as you might expect, full of double entendres, verbal mischief and magic, puns, and meaningful information about the intricacies of Joyce's work, including occasional mentions of Finnegans Wake and Dubliners. I don't know if readers not familiar with Ulysses would be engaged by the Rios novel. For those of us who are, some of the interpretative material and glosses will be old news, but much of it will be new. That makes The House of Ulysses a fascinating, valuable read, whether we already understood a particular facet of the diamond or not, because Ulysses is one of those novels we'll never get to the bottom of.