The Biology of Luck by Jacob Appel (review)

When Joyce wanted it known that his Ulysses was based on The Odyssey, he affixed episode titles corresponding to those of Homer (later removed); he created schemas to circulate among acquaintances; and, most of all, he announced it: he bruited it about to his admirers, who passed on the word to other admirers. Soon it became part of the lore of the novel, incorporated into the various apparatuses that readers use to approach the book. As an experiment, we might ask ourselves: if Joyce had not made this known, had he not included the titles with The Little Review episodes, would readers have thought of Ulysses as an adaptation/parody/rewrite of Homer? To what extent would the parallels be seen as central to understanding the novel?

When Jacob Appel wants it known that his 2013 novel The Biology of Luck is based on Ulysses, he too must announce it. Otherwise, would readers notice? Well, probably yes: the book, set in New York City, chronicles the activities during one day in June of a protagonist named Larry Bloom. Surely not every same-day novel must be compared to Joyce, though, and the character’s name is unremarkable to the extent that 2013 saw the advent of an entirely different NYC character named Larry Bloom on the popular series Orange Is the New Black. Also, Mel Brooks’s The Producers should have cured us of the idea that naming a character after Leopold Bloom necessarily makes a text an homage to Joyce. Still, Appel’s readers who notice these parallels with Ulysses will likely dig for more, and they will be rewarded with a bushel of them. We will, however, never know how many people would recognize the novel as a thorough adaptation/parody/rewrite of Ulysses without authorial intervention because the book’s apparatus features an interview with Appel in which he says, “I can’t wait for the day that a reader takes on the challenge of finding these parallels [to Ulysses] and writes an essay on the subject” (213). It is a canny remark, one designed to provoke the very review unfolding before the eyes of JJQ readers. Of course, literary scholars know not to submit blindly to authorial directives, so in what follows I will, yes, I will tease out some of the ways that Biology means to recall Ulysses, but I hope also to open a discussion about whether we should care.

For Appel’s Bloom, it is an average day in that he goes about his daily routine as a tour guide, leading a troupe of visitors through Manhattan. It is additionally an exceptional day, for it is the one on which he will learn whether his novel titled The Biology of Luck (more on that soon) will be published; in the morning, he visits a post office—ahem—to retrieve the letter from his publisher, carries the unopened envelope throughout the hours, loses it once, and recovers it. Moreover, it is the day he will declare his love for his longtime object of desire, Starshine Hart, and ask whether she might return his favor. Larry’s literary career is thus intertwined with his amorous intentions, in ways that recall Joyce’s decision to set Ulysses, a novel of Leopold and Molly Bloom’s marriage, on the day of his first date, and putative sexual encounter, with Nora Barnacle. Larry stands in for both Poldy and Joyce, and Starshine is both Nora and Molly. The actually exceptional nature of Larry Bloom’s day reminds us that although it is sometimes said that Ulysses is about an average day of an average person walking around 1904 Dublin, Leopold Bloom’s 16 June is everything but ordinary to him.

The overlap of Appel’s novel title and Larry’s novel title is merely the beginning of the narrative game in Biology. Chapters about Larry’s peregrinations in New York alternate in the book with chapters from Larry’s novel, which turns out to be his...