We Were Never the Same Since

Molly Bloom, awake past two, is counting her husband's faults, and the count runs from his beard to his wages. This is James Joyce's Penelope, the last episode of Ulysses, and Philip Kitcher takes her list more seriously than she does, because he thinks some of her charges are unfair and that she half knows it. He traces a lieutenant Bloom has never heard of, finds a question hiding behind her boast about the other sopranos, and sets Dublin's favourite story about the Bloom marriage beside what Molly remembers of her mother. Then he arrives at the one loss the two of them describe in nearly the same words.