Mendelsohn had an awkward, if never exactly turbulent, relationship with his father, a research scientist and maths professor who died, in his 80s, in 2012. This is a gentle, at times almost nostalgic, work. Mendelsohn the stern critic is absent from these pages. I was therefore struck, on reading An Odyssey – a memoir in which Mendelsohn explores his relationship with his father through the prism of Homer’s epic – by its soft, delicate tone. More recently, Hanya Yanagihara’s much-garlanded novel about sexual abuse, A Little Life, came in for a similar drubbing. A few years ago, in the New York Review of Books, he memorably laid into the TV series Mad Men, describing the writing as “extremely weak” and the acting as “bland and often amateurish”. D aniel Mendelsohn is an American academic and critic known for his lofty broadsides against the prevailing cultural consensus.
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