From ‘The Odyssey’ to ‘Offspring,’ Daniel Mendelsohn on What to Read, What to Watch

As a classics scholar and a culture critic who’s also an international best-selling author, 1982 University of Virginia alumnus Daniel Mendelsohn writes about everything from Greek epics to the latest TV series.

Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College in Annandale-On-Hudson, New York, reviews literature, film and television, often weaving in his extensive knowledge of classics. His essays are most frequently published in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, for which he’s recently become editor-at-large.

His own reviewers often call him one of the best writers and critics working today.

The author of three memoirs, Mendelsohn won the National Book Critics Circle Award and several other international prizes in 2006 for “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” which detailed his quest to discover the fates of family members in the Holocaust.

His latest, “An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and An Epic,” published in 2017, won France’s Prix Méditerranée and was named a best book of the year by NPR, Library Journal and the Christian Science Monitor. The book dives into the powerful relationship of father and son, both in Homer’s epic and in real life, as it recounts Mendelsohn’s 81-year-old father auditing his son’s seminar on Homer’s “The Odyssey,” after which the two take a Mediterranean cruise themed to retrace the route of that mythical journey.

Mendelsohn’s essay collections include “Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture” and “How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken,” both heaped with praises for their wisdom and wit, intelligence and emotional insight. His third collection, “Ecstasy and Terror: From the Greeks to Game of Thrones,” will be published in October.

UVA Today asked Mendelsohn what he’s writing, reading and watching on television, as well as what he’s talking about in the Page-Barbour Lectures that brought him back to Charlottesville this week. The three lectures, Tuesday through Thursday, were to address “A Digression: Narrative Afterlives of the Odyssey.”

He also revealed who he thinks is “the greatest novelist in the English language” and several recent TV series worth watching.

Q. How did UVA influence your career choices after you graduated?

A. Well, I was a classics major, and of course classics has become a major focus of my writing for a general audience, apart from the scholarship I did. But I’d say that the most important role that UVA played in my later life was the model of intellectual cosmopolitanism that I was exposed to here – first, of course, in the example of Thomas Jefferson, but on a more concrete level in the models that my professors provided; in the intellectual life I was able to lead as an Echols Scholar, which allowed me to follow my interests; and in the very interesting social life I could lead in Charlottesville at the time, which is actually filled with fascinating people outside as well as inside the University.

So, I’d say all that combined to give me a sense that one could have a rich intellectual and public life in many ways, which is what I’ve ended up having. 

Q. Can you give a brief summary of the theme of your Page-Barbour Lectures?

A. The lectures are loosely connected by the theme of “digression” as a literary technique – very loosely! What the lectures have turned into is something I do often, which is to connect both personal and literary elements and twine them together.

In this case, some musings on the difficulties of writing “An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic” have led me to ponder just what narrative is for, which in turn led me to consider the life and work of some interesting writers who, in one way or another, have been influenced by “The Odyssey,” from the 17th-century French writer François Fénelon, who wrote an early fan-fiction based on characters from Homer’s poem, to the great German scholar Erich Auerbach, who opens his magisterial study of Western literature, “Mimesis,” with a chapter that dissects the narrative technique of one episode in Book 19 of “The Odyssey.”

And then I started to notice that all of these writers’ lives were connected, moreover, by the theme of religious persecution. … and I try to wrap all these themes together in the lectures!

Q. How do you connect classics themes with contemporary writing and/or cultural phenomena?

A. I’m always thinking of classics and classical texts as models in one way or another. And it’s not just a case of, “Well, ‘Battlestar Galactica’ is really just a reincarnation of ‘The Aeneid’” (although it is – a civilization is destroyed, a tiny band of survivors is told by an oracle that there’s a new homeland for them, and then they have to find it while fighting off various enemies: hello?).

More broadly, so much of how we think about the world is already formed by the classical inheritance, it’s in our DNA so much that we respond very strongly to certain real-life stories that echo those myths. Think of the historical events that we can’t seem to let go of – that’s why. For example, the JFK assassination replays certain hero-narratives to be found in “The Iliad,” or the Titanic story reenacts the myth of hubris and nemesis. 

Q. What are you currently working on in your writing?

A. I’m doing a how-to-read-the-classics book, in fact. No curveballs, nothing weird or abstruse – just the greatest hits and why we love ’em, and how to read them.

I’m also now working on a new translation of “The Odyssey”! For University of Chicago Press. So that’s exciting, and daunting. 

Q. What are you currently reading?

A. I’ve just finished a year-and-a-half long (re-)reading of all of Charles Dickens. I’m just floored by how great he is – the inventiveness, the range, the generosity. So rare. He’s by far the greatest novelist in the English language; all American college students should be made to read him. And they’d love it. 

Q. Are you watching any TV series that you’ll be writing about?

A. Ha! I’m always watching tons of TV. I just finished all four seasons of the great British series, “Line of Duty”; a terrific, really touching and funny series called “Sex Education”; a rather steamy and fun Spanish series about a murderer in an elite high school called (what else?) “Elite”; and all the seasons of “The Great British Baking Show,” which was heaven on Earth.

There was also “Bodyguard,” which I loved, and I just finished “Russian Doll” as well, and a quite good Australian serial-killer series called “Deep Water.” 

Which reminds me, one of the best shows I’ve seen in ages is the great Australian dramedy, “Offspring,” about a young woman OB/GYN doctor and her nutty family and attempts to find love.

There is so much great TV these days, the problem is knowing what NOT to watch.

Q. You recently were named editor-at-large at the New York Review of Books, as well as director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, the aim of which is to support writers. What will these roles entail?

A. At the NYRB, I’m basically going to preside over everything that has to do with, roughly speaking, “outreach.” We want to start a number of series of events in both the U.S. and abroad, public conversations in which our contributors can be paired with interesting local figures to talk about interesting and pressing subjects. We want to have an annual festival. We want to partner with cultural institutions to create new events – in fact, while I’m down here I’ll be talking to the folks at Monticello, with whom we’re hoping to do events. I want to start a great podcast series linked to each new issue that will feature contributors talking about their pieces. And I’d like to have a great and really cool app. 

As for the Silvers Foundation, I was so touched that Bob in his will named me the director of this foundation that will continue his editorial legacy. There is still a great prejudice in American culture that still tends to see fiction as the only real “literature” and ignores everything else. Bob Silvers at the Review cultivated wonderful nonfiction writing – journalism, criticism, arts writing, essays – and the foundation will reward and promote excellence in those fields, by means of both grants to writers working on interesting projects and a new series of prizes, to start this year, for the three categories I’ve mentioned: long-form journalism, criticism and arts writing. At $30,000 each, they’ll be among the very richest literary awards in this country for nonfiction writing, recognizing that nonfiction and criticism are every bit as literary as anything else.  

And of course, we’ll also be doing events and activities that will focus on those genres, too. So that’ll be fun.