The Sixteenth of June: A Novel by Maya Lang (review)

What would happen if the Leopold Bloom of 1904 Dublin were to metempsychose as Leopold Portman, a beer-drinking, sports-watching, former Boston University fraternity boy, who now drives around 2004 Philadelphia in his well-polished Cadillac Escalade to his job as an IT consultant? And what if brooding aesthete Stephen were to turn up, improbably, as Leopold’s elder brother, so that the two could battle for the affections of Nora, an opera singer who is Leopold’s girlfriend and Stephen’s best friend?

Fortunately, such is not the case in The Sixteenth of June, Maya Lang’s debut novel, though readers will be forgiven for thinking otherwise for the first seventy-two pages, until they learn that Stephen and Leopold were so named by their Joyceaphile parents, Michael and June Portman—respectively a derivatives trader and a social climber—who have also named their dog Dedalus. As further evidence of their love for all things Joycean, during the twenty-four hours that the novel takes place, Michael and June press on with their plans for their annual Bloomsday celebration (it is, after all, the centennial) despite the death of Grandma Portman the day before. She would have wanted it that way.

That neither Michael nor June seems to have read Ulysses explains only partially their odd strategy of filial and canine naming, and it is the uncertain function of Ulysses within The Sixteenth of June that proves most problematic for Lang’s novel. On one hand, the story wants to satirize the elite literary culture associated with high modernism; the author dedicates it to “all the readers who never made it through Ulysses (or haven’t wanted to try).” On the other hand, like the Portman parents themselves, the novel relishes the cultural capital it accrues via its association with Joyce. Divided into eighteen chapters that occasionally take note of their corresponding Ulyssean episodes (though often they do not), Lang liberally weaves lines from Ulysses into her own prose. I share two representative examples (for the curious, the author provides a partial listing of approximately fifty such allusions on her website, though most references will be apparent to readers of the JJQ).¹ The first occurs when Nora laments her inability to move on emotionally following the death of her own mother a year earlier: “Everyone thinks the past is the nightmare . . . [but it’s] the present that threatens to consume you” (21). The second occurs at the Bloomsday party, when Stephen and Leopold argue about which son the parents most favor: “‘Persecution,’ Stephen says. ‘All the history of the world is full of it. You just don’t expect it to happen in your own home’” (144).

It is through transposed quotations such as these that The Sixteenth of June most clearly reveals its vexed relationship with Joyce’s Ulysses—and its distance from other works of literature that engage with canonical intertexts, such as Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, and Michael Cunningham’s The Hours.² Each of those works enters into open dialogue with its predecessor, with the understanding that both intertext and after-text have something substantial to talk about: in Salih’s postcolonial response to Heart of Darkness, the process by which imperialism corrupts both knowledge and desire; in Smiley’s midwestern reworking of King Lear, the illuminations of feminist and ecocritical insight; and in Cunningham’s variations on Mrs. Dalloway, the understanding that gender and queerness are historically embedded. The problem with The Sixteenth of June is that it does not know what to say to its intertext nor what its intertext has to say to it. The closest it comes is when Stephen and his dissertation director discuss the respective values in fiction of sincerity versus “[l]iterary acrobatics” (177), but this conversation never moves beyond a superficial opposition, either when it occurs between these two academics or within the novel as a whole...