What's most intriguing about Pete Buttigieg choosing Ulysses as his favorite novel in several media venues, which caused tiny but very loud eruptions yesterday on the internet, is that it was the “wrong” choice, in a lifetime that seems largely unblemished by those. His CV is immaculate: Harvard, a Rhodes Scholarship, service in Afghanistan, a few years at McKinsey, resounding success as a blue mayor in a red state. A supernaturally charming husband. Even his name, which might seem like a liability, has become a weird advantage, an icebreaker. You could take a hard look at the McKinsey thing, but listen: I have personally attended three Phish shows. Nobody gets out of white male privilege with clean hands.
And now Ulysses!
The most obvious (and saddest) explanation for the choice is that it's another blue-chip asset. It's hard to get into, like Harvard. Reading it is maybe akin to knocking off one of the seven summits, or becoming a member of Baltusrol: “Performative intellectualism,” as Jeet Heer of the New Republic hazarded.
Yet if Buttigieg merely wanted to send us a signal, he chose uncharacteristically poorly. There are dozens of great, substantial, “impressive” books that are, in the first place, not widely considered pretentious to even mention, and second, not about a Jewish cuckold wandering Dublin, buying soap and occasionally masturbating. (Almost the entirety of literature is not about that, as it happens.)
The reaction bore that out. Adam Serwer, a staff writer at The Atlantic, tweeted, “Ulysses is an important book to read if you want to be well versed in the Western Canon. No one is reading Ulysses for fun.” That is ridiculous on its face — people do lots of stuff for fun that is far more inscrutable than reading James Joyce — and Serwer later deleted the tweet. Nevertheless, it seemed to sum up a certain feeling within even literary Twitter, which was that Buttigieg had gone too far in trying to amaze us. He'd already learned Norwegian; he could have left it there.
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