Marilyn French's reading of Ulysses offers a bold and challenging new interpretation of the novel while most Joyceans are spending their time glossing and footnoting. The originality of The Book as World is found in its sustained effort to relate Joyce's successive styles to the overall meaning of the novel. It is odd that a novel with such a reputation for consummate artistic design should also be universally recognized to be formally problematic. Every serious reader of Ulysses must grapple with the apparent divergence of matter and manner, of surface and symbol. Marilyn French refuses to apologize for the way the various styles of the later chapters seem to overwhelm the developing story of Bloom and Stephen; instead she offers a reading in which these styles are intrinsic to Joyce's narrative strategy. Ulysses has never before been such a fully coherent novel.

The reader, not Bloom, is French's...