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Stephen Dedalus, Joyce’s alter ego from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” is thrust into the role of Telemachus, Odysseus’ son, recast as a lofty aesthete grieving the death of his mother while keeping his distance from his overbearing, dissolute father.

The strategy developed out of Gaines’s own “Submerged Text” series from the early 1990s, a conceptual artwork in which Gaines took a section of writing from Kafka’s “The Castle” or James Joyce’s “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” highlighting words and phrases that he saw as “signifiers of race” and replacing everything else with numbers.

But although I registered the novel’s considerable stylistic debts both to Hemingway and Faulkner — not to mention “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” — I was so intoxicated by its music that the point seemed academic.

Slote, the professor, quoted a line from “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in which Joyce says a writer is “a priest of eternal imagination, transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

Read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, as that may help you with the characters.