A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The second time through was amazing. This is an incredible book, and there's a reason it consistently shows up near the top of critics' lists of greatest novels of the twentieth century.

First, Joyce's prose style is in a league of its own (thankfully, it's nothing like Ulysses or Finnegans Wake at this point in his career). In this book, as in his short stories, the man is a linguistic wizard, making every word count. He's subtle, articulate, and precise, and the rhythm of his sentences make his prose a pleasure to read. Page after page, I found myself slowing down just to enjoy the literary richness. Here's a typical example:

"He raised his eyes towards the slow-drifting clouds, dappled and seaborne. They were voyaging across the deserts of the sky, a host of nomads on the march, voyaging high above Ireland, westward bound. The Europe they had come from lay out there beyond the Irish Sea, Europe of strange tongues and valleyed and woodbegirt and citadelled and of entrenched and marshalled races. He heard a confused music within him as of memories and names which he was almost conscious of but could not capture even for an instant; then the music seemed to recede . . . and from each receding trail of nebulous music there fell always one longdrawn calling note, piercing like a star the dusk of silence. Again! . . . A voice from beyond the world was calling."

Beyond his prose style, Joyce is simply a genius as a writer. An arrogant, godless genius, but a genius nonetheless. I'm fascinated by the way he uses story structure and characterization to bring a unified idea out of diversity. All of the particulars of the work come together like a symphony to produce a powerful message. Even his use of stream-of-consciousness at times in this book reflects his view that "the artist, like the God of creation, [should remain] within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails." And as this quotation shows, Joyce realized that his own artistry reflects the artistry of the God of creation.

But as a Christian, I can't give in to the temptation to completely embrace the book. Joyce makes some very blasphemous statements in this book because, unfortunately, he threw all of Christianity out with the legalistic Jesuit bathwater. He seems never to have been exposed to the type of Christianity that recognizes our full humanity, that affirms that the imagination should, in Francis Schaeffer's words, "fly beyond the stars." Had he been exposed to it, I think Joyce would have been tempted to agree.

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