The odyssey of The Odyssey is itself quite the tale. Throughout the centuries, creative reinterpretations of Homer’s epic have been offered by everyone from Dante Alighieri, who placed Odysseus in the eighth circle of his Inferno, to James Joyce, who reconceived the titular hero as an ethnic Jew wandering the streets of early twentieth-century Dublin. Ever since Virgil’s The Aeneid retconned the ending of major parts of the story, significant writers like Nikos Kazantzakis have even written sequels to Odysseus’s adventures. And of course, recently Christopher Nolan’s own adaptation was the center of a various online controversies over both casting as well as perceived thematic departures from the original poem.

All this is to say there is no definitive version of the now archetypal story. Far from being a problem, this demonstrates the enormous depths of a myth that can sustain enormously different readings. One recent take on Odysseus’s suffering has been offered by conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen in his new book, American Odyssey: What an Ancient Story Reveals about Our Divided Souls. Deneen is best known for defending “postliberalism,” an ideology that blames liberalism for spreading a kind of libertine nihilism that has corroded our sense of community and weakened our commitment to the common good. American Odyssey shows Deneen at his best as a thoughtful conservative analyst, with a cooler tone than in some of his more overheated recent work. But it also reveals the limits of his understanding of human nature and what people need to thrive.