Telemachus

Michael Daley raises the bar on father-son tales.

Telémachus, archetype of the boy left behind, is, in this novel, the son of M.M. Bacca, famous contemporary American poet, critic and foul-mouthed crank, untrustworthy, unapproachable. Bobby revisits the Bacca legend through stories told by those who knew him best. He remembers the summer he was thirteen. Yet his own memories intersect with the effects of trauma pervading the adult lives of his contemporaries. This “sidebar of an odyssey” modernizes the abandonment and allure for might depicted by Homer, the “first and greatest pacifist poet.” Bobby, now a painter of miniature landscapes, narrates his father’s story as it leads to a night in the summer; his father has returned to town after a car accident when his passenger was killed. He’s become even more of an emotional cripple than he was prior to the death he caused.Though Mac Bacca is no hero, nor is he a Leopold Bloom, his aberrant and twisted personality takes us on a ride over some strange country along the neglected yet familiar path of the male soul.