The Boston Globe from Boston, Massachusetts • N15

Boston Sunday Globe Books N15 SEPTEMBER 17, 2017 THE RISE AND FALL OF ADAM AND EVE By Stephen Greenblatt Norton, 419 illustrated, 27.95 The first power couple By Anthony Domestico GLOBE CORRESPONDENT The best works of cultural history aren't those that provoke a mere nod of assent, the sense that history was just so. Rather, they're books that adrenalize and agitate, provoke a response, cause you to underline, argue, and curse. By this standard, Stephen Greenb-latt's "The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve" is a good book indeed. When Greenblatt describes the novelty of Milton's focus on Adam and Eve's "inner lives" in "Paradise Lost," I nodded vigorously. When he reads Augustine's theology as an intellectualizing of sexual guilt, I got so frustrated that I had to put the book aside for several days.

A critic who can elicit such varied responses is one worth reading and contending with. We all know the story: the first man formed from clay, the first woman formed from his rib, the serpent, the Tree, the terrible repercussions. But Greenblatt, eminent Harvard professor and winner of both a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, tells the story of this story how Adam and Eve have been conceived and recon-ceived over the millennia. Their story has been used to justify misogyny and to abolish private property, to engage questions of ultimate concern (why "You vain men hate women's beauty because your impure hearts prevent you from enjoying her presence without lust." Yet there are also stretches that had me sometimes literally shaking my fist the long section on Augustine, in particular. All Christian theology is a footnote to Augustine, and Greenblatt rightly emphasizes the theologian's centrality to later Christian thought on will and desire, human fallenness and divine mercy.

Less convincingly, Greenblatt interprets Augustine's theology as a working out of the guilt he felt over sexual desire. The story of Adam and Eve, by this reading, explains humanity's essential sinfulness and Augustine's own. Yet Augustine actually finds us most human when we are most Christ-like, most loving and merciful. Fallenness is real for Augustine. But that doesn't mean that we're fundamentally corrupt.

It means that we're blind to our truest selves. All critics have biases. Greenblatt's is a tendency to see all of history pointing toward, and finding its ultimate fulfillment in, Renaissance humanism: the "unprecedented illusion of life" its artists provide, the loosening up of all that doom-and-gloom Christian theology. To which a medievalist might respond: What about Chaucer? Or Margery Kempe? Augustine himself wasn't just obsessed with sex. He also was attuned to the beauty of life and the pleasures of friendship.

His is a theology of love. Arguing with Greenblatt about these ideas is a pleasure, though, as is his clear prose and the fluidity with which he moves between paintings and poems and polemics. This is the kind of book lucid and delightfully infuriating that I wish more academic superstars would write. Anthony Domestico is an assistant professor of literature at Purchase College, SUNYand the author of "Poetry and Theology in the Modernist Period." allegorical reading, arguing that the story's details were not literally true but "hints toward a concealed and more abstract the later, more doctrinally rigid thinkers who argued the story must stand or fall by its literal truth; still later artists like Milton who depicted Adam and Eve as "flesh-and-blood people, better than we are, to be sure, but not different in kind and not philosophical and finally those moderns who ceased believing in an actual garden or a real snake altogether. The story of Adam and Eve is an ironic one in hoping to become God-like, humans only become more human-like and Greenblatt says that its legacy is ironic, too.

Because Milton and others were so successful in imagining the Fall not as mere allegory but as historical event, later believers asked not just whether the story was aesthetically convincing but whether it really could have happened. Many answered no, and so, Greenblatt claims, "the story began to die." This book is frequently very good, as when Greenblatt examines Renaissance depictions of Eden: Van Eyck's precise attention to "Adam's clipped toenails and his random hairs," Diir-er's creation of an Adam "stitched together according to an idealizing geometrical scheme drawn from a pagan idol." This is criticism at its best, showing how particular details arise from, and contribute to, history's currents: humanism, with its focus on creaturely beauty; classicism, with its willingness to borrow from ancient sources. There are also delightful little squibs of theological history, like when the 17th-century nun Arcange-la Tarabotti, defending women against Eve-inspired hatred, writes, STERLING AND FRANCINE CLARK ART INSTITUTE Their story has been used to justify various causes and to engage questions large and small. And here to explore the power of narrative. are we so ill-fitted to the world?) and those of more practical import (why do we fear And here to explore the power of narrative.

As presented in Genesis, their story seems a simple one, though Greenblatt reminds us of its many strange parts. (How could an eternal God "take a walk in the cool of the evening The story's afterlife, though, is labyrinthine, and Greenblatt leads us through its many byways and dead ends: the early Jewish and Christian theologians who urged an Father and son 'Odyssey' AN ODYSSEY A Father, a Son, and an Epic By Daniel Mendelsohn Knopf, 320 $26.95 CHRIS FELVER AFTERGLOW: A Dog Memoir By Eileen Myles Grove, 207 illustrated, $24 By John Freeman GLOBE CORRESPONDENT For a book about a man who missed a lot of his son's life, "The Odyssey" has much to say about fathers and sons. Homer's epic begins and ends with a son in search of his father, after all, and Odysseus's infamous island tests aside besides the sirens! the book's innermost ring concerns how fathering is for many men the ultimate measure of time. There are many reasons why Daniel Mendelsohn understands this better than most. As a translator from the Greek, roving critic, and professor at Bard, Mendelsohn has lived and breathed many of the book's lessons for decades now.

He employed them to devastating effect in his 2006 National Book Critics Circle winning memoir, "The Lost," which searched out the stories of his relatives lost in the Holocaust. In "An Odyssey," his tender new memoir, though, he reveals how much more he had to learn by reading Homer's great epic through his own father's eyes. The set up of "An Odyssey" is an Alan Alda movie waiting to happen. In January of 2011, Mendelsohn's 81-year-old father, Jay, asked whether he could sit in on his son's course on "The Odyssey." That notion was in keeping with what Mendelsohn understood of his father, a retired-computer-science professor and mathematician, raised in the Bronx, used to doing things on his own. It also hints at a tension between the two: As a student the older man had an interest in classics generally and Latin in particular his talents in his son's area of expertise outstripping those of the son's in math.

Over the years the father "would occasionally make a stab at recouping what he'd lost all those years back" on his own, with little success. This class would represent a last chance to read the great works. On one level, "An Odyssey" elegantly retells the story of that course, complete with all the gags, competition, and good cheer of an intragenerational bromance. The son takes care to try to steady his aging father only to find the elder man robustly stubborn and unimpressed by Homer's lying, cheating hero. Students used to reviewing their teacher online watch agog as Mendelsohn's pedagogy is reviewed live by his mathematician father.

Chapter by chapter, "An Odyssey" dives deeper and excavates a complex and moving portrait of Mendelsohn's special student. Drawing on the concepts within Homer's book, from the proem the short prelude, or synopsis, to the poem to the many-layered meaning of some translations, Mendelsohn uses Homer's guidance for how to tell Jay's story. He lingers on his lonely childhood, his early brilliance, his forfeiture of Latin for a life of numbers. Why a man so warm could be so cold. One of the book's most lacerating threads explores Mendelsohn's hunger for a mentor, a word that traces its roots to "The Odyssey." Mentor, the writer re- minds, was the old man Odysseus relied upon for guidance and in whose hands he placed the fate of his son, Telemachus.

When the goddess Athena comes to Ithaca to encourage the boy to search out the fate of his missing father, she arrives in the guise of Mentor. As a gay teen obsessed with antiquity, growing up in the suburbs, Mendelsohn learned to cultivate mentors at a young age. One of the shadow journeys of "An Odyssey" traces Mendelsohn's zigzagging education from these surrogates, from early music teachers to Jenny Strauss Clay, his first classics professor at University of Virginia, a "scathingly-brilliant," chain-smoking iconoclast and innovator. Mendelsohn's father urged him to study at Virginia for reasons it takes the entirety of "An Odyssey" to understand in their full poignancy. In the meantime, as Mendelsohn unpeels the layers of his father's life and education, he dramatizes the beauty and tedium of what he has learned in the classroom.

"The best teacher," Mendelsohn writes at one point, "is the one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure." This is a lovely sentiment, but the reality of instruction is messy and imperfect even in the best classes, especially one being audited by a father. Mendelsohn happily shows us how difficult the transference of passion can be: the silent students, the stalled discussions, the misdirections, and then the burst of voices when discovery heaves into view. In this way, the students in Mendelsohn's seminar become minor supporting characters to the book's hero, his father, who lurks in the corner like a hero in disguise. As in "The Odyssey," there is but one ending to Mendelsohn's book, one revealed in his own's opening pages. Within a year of this class, Jay would die and so Mendelsohn's journey indeed like Homer's would be undertaken after the fact, when something remained to be learned.

It is a remarkable feat of narration that such a forbiddingly erudite writer can show us how necessary this education is, how provisional, how frightening, how comforting. John Freeman teaches writing at NYU. His latest books are "Maps," a collection of poems, and "Tales of Two Americas: Tales of Inequality in a Divided America." By Matthew Gilbert GLOBE STAFF If you've read Eileen Myles before, you know that her new book, "Afterglow: A Dog Memoir," is surely not going to be "Marley Me" or "The Art of Racing in the Rain." You'll laugh, and you'll cry, yes, but you'll also think hard, as you work to pull together the many disparate, cosmic, and charming notions Myles sets forth. In other words, this poet-novelist isn't taking a bath in sentimentality about the loss of Rosie, the pit bull whom the Massachusetts native rescued as a pupin New York's East Village of in 1990. Instead, with her quicksilver intellect and her whimsy fully engaged, Myles explores the parallels between "Dog" and "God," whether Rosie, who died in 2006, is her father reincarnated, the existential strangeness of receiving a cement paw print of your dead dog, and how Rosie may have envisioned her.

"Afterglow" is a challenging read that spirals up into big and little thoughts all inspired by her beloved companion, bringing in seemingly unrelated topics along the way such as the "self -war" of Kurt Cobain, libraries, gender identity, Abu Ghraib, George W. Bush's farts, and, at some length, sea foam. The book is structured as a series of essays, each somehow linked to the bond between dog and owner, many written in unconventional memoir formats, including science fiction, poetry, and interview. My favorite chapter, "Goodnight, Sweet Queen," is an annotated list of Rosie-related things that Myles plans to toss in the aftermath of sex that was impossible to ignore, yet bureaucratic somehow," she writes. The scene, followed by Rosie's nonstop gas, is indelible.

Likewise the scene in "The Order of Drinking (3-D)" of Rosie disappearing at a meeting of what Myles calls "the club," Alcoholics Anonymous. Myles is in the audience pondering just how brilliant her response to the speaker will be "Surely I will be lauded and since I am true poet my language nature will inevitably vibrate on a higher subtler plane" when she realizes the missing Rosie may well have pooped somewhere in the room. At moments, Myles does share her memories and grief, and those instances are all the more powerful for their infrequency. Here's her take on what so many dog people simply refer to as the "unconditional love" of a dog owner, as she addresses Rosie's spirit: "You liked snow, and rain and air and sun and the beach. You loved these things and I brought you to them and you smiled.

I suppose I could've imagined you loved me then but I only knew loved you because I saw you in my way and I was listening. And you simply were. I loved you for that. For being who else was in my life no matter what." Myles writes that she doesn't want to stop talking to Rosie, that she has written the book, she says, "to keep talking to her." Luckily for us, we can eavesdrop on that long, wry, far-flung, and wonderfully loving conversation. The Globe's television critic, Matthew Gilbert, author "Off the Leash: A Year at the Dog Park," can be reached at matthew.gilbertglobe.com.

Rosie's passing, including a plastic cone, dog painkillers, and a dog raincoat that still smells like her. The objects trigger memories, such as a blue food bowl that reminds her of throwing tomato sauce over Rosie's food: "Because your face was white the orange sauce would stain your maw and you looked stupid plus beautiful. Sauce is makeup around these parts." Throughout the book, Myles' punctuation plays by its own rules, forcing us to sound out her sentences as we read them. Another favorite chapter is "The Puppets' Talk Show," the imagined interview between Rosie and Myles's childhood toy puppet, Oscar. During the chat, we learn that the immodest Rosie, as she says, "wrote virtually every poem by Eileen Myles from 1990 to 2006." We also learn that Rosie's name for Myles is "Jethro." The more we find out about Rosie, or Myles's projections of Rosie, the more we can see she wasn't merely the stereotypical panting, loyal friend; she was more interesting than that.

When Rosie recalls Myles' "whining and huffing" and wondering "Why can't anyone see I'm a genius," the author's self-irony is perfectly clear. Humor is embedded in all of these chapters, not least of all the one named "The Rape of Rosie." It's an uncomfortable story about the time Myles tried to breed 2-year-old Rosie with a dog named Buster in her New York apartment. "It was.