For James McMichael, Joyce's Ulysses invites the wide range of interpretations it has received: what it also does is to prod its interpreters to put the book to some just use. If Ulysses were more conventional than it is, McMichael claims, its readers could set more comfortable limits for themselves in their responses to it, limits that did not extend beyond Ulysses into their dealings with persons in the world. But what happens instead is that the singularly unconventional narrative structure of Ulysses keeps reminding them that the story they are being told about any of the...