The giant on their shoulders

Fiction: So much of this novel feels like a literary exercise that the story at the heart of it, the distance that grows between a couple after their only child's death, gets buried.

The Eccles in the title is the first clue to the literary reference point, but the names of the main characters Leo and Molly Bluhm confirm it. It's not so much that Judith Kitchen has transposed Ulysses to Dublin, Ohio, more that she has borrowed from the shape of that book - from Molly's wanderings around Dublin to the stream of consciousness at the end of the book where the word "no" provides the punctuation instead of the famous "yes". Inevitably her Leo and Molly creak under the weight of the literary giant she has placed on their shoulders.

There are many layers of borrowing in this book, even the title belongs to someone else. In the acknowledgement, Kitchen says that 'The House on Eccles Road' was the title of a short story by J.M. Coetzee whose main character is Marion Bloom, wife of Leopold Bloom.

We meet the Bluhms on June 16th, their wedding anniversary. They are academics living a quiet, cultured, middle-class life. The day starts with Molly hoping her husband will remember their anniversary but he doesn't. Throughout the day, the two miss phone calls from each other and their lack of connectedness is a symptom of a deeper communication breakdown that began eight years before when their only son, Arjay, died.

The most fully realised character in the book is Leo, vain and self-centred, who gives his classes on English literature, plays tennis and meets a favourite student, Steve (whose best friend, in a typical Joycism, is called Buck).

Molly wanders. This being a very different Dublin her wanderings are in the car, and take her to visit an old love, to the mall to buy a baby gift (a lemon blanket) but it is her internal journey that is most interesting, representing her emergence into the world from eight years of mourning.

Her Irish ancestry shows itself in her love of Irish music and she gets strength from that heritage, while Leo's Jewish heritage, reawakened at the time of his son's death, creates a distance between them - a fascinating theme that would have been interesting to explore if the author hadn't had to take so many Joycean diversions - such as her improbable Nighttime trip to the red light district in Dublin, Ohio.

The author has a strong voice, a deft ability to switch between characters and an evocative lyrical style, and there is an interesting novel in here. However if you've read Ulysess or know anything about it, Kitchen's story can't fully emerge and is strangled by what often seems simply like a literary gimmick.

• Bernice Harrison is a journalist and Radio Critic of The Irish Times