P

P tells the story of Benjamin Seymour, a failed New York City pornographer obsessed with his lost love, and Finn, a ten-year-old runaway girl genius. Separately and then together they wander the city over the course of a single day, searching for love and life through lust and loss.

P is the literary equivalent of a cover song. Conn, a film critic and essayist, here covers Ulysses (Joyce is "St. James" in the acknowledgments), a novel that poses obvious challenges to a young writer hoping to pay homage. Technically, the talented Conn is more than proficient. His take on Ulysses is set in Manhattan on (of course) June 16, 1996. His Leopold Bloom is Benjamin Seymour, an Ivy League-educated pornographer (director, actor) chafing his way through three years of celibacy in mourning for his dead true love, Penelope. Stephen Dedalus is Finn, a 10-year-old girl, who ditches her elite prep school to smoke dope, beg for change and wander the city. Conn's discursions on the porn industry and his stream-of-consciousness presentation of Manhattan through a child's stoned gaze are smart and fun to read. Scenes recounting Penelope and Benjamin's doomed relationship are at once tender and tortured, imbued with a complexity that is rare in a first-time novelist. These accomplishments are considerable, but Conn's novel is hamstrung by its slavish devotion to Ulysses. Overschematic and hyperallusive, P will be mystifying to those unfamiliar with the source material and vexing to those who know it. Such is perhaps the inevitable pitfall of tributes. One hopes that Conn will next apply his gifts to a more freewheeling project.
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