As we know now, the novel’s greatest transgressions were not against decency and morality but against the forms and conventions of fiction writing itself. The entire action of “Ulysses” takes place in a single day, skipping from character to character in seemingly no particular order. Stylistically, the book mingles high and low, poetry and banality, profundity and cliché. There are moments described from inside a character’s head, as well as stretches of pastiche and parody; burlesque chapters; a chapter in play form and one that’s a mock catechism; and even some sections that come close to gibberish. After reading the Sirens section — the one that begins: “Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining imperthnthn thnthnthn” — Ezra Pound worried that Joyce might have “got knocked on the head.”

“Ulysses” is a one-off. It’s telling that although countless writers as varied as Beckett, Virginia Woolf (even though she said she hated the book), Donald Barthelme and David Foster Wallace have been influenced by it, no one since Joyce has attempted anything on quite the same scale. Still, just about every device that Joyce employed is now a standard part of the novelist’s repertoire, and none of them raise much of an eyebrow anymore. The rules have so changed — and our notion of what is novelistically possible so expanded — that if “Ulysses” were to come along now, with no controversy to cash in on, it would probably be published by someplace like Dalkey Archive, not Random House, and it might not cause much of a stir at all. To a generation that has already read “Naked Lunch” and “Gravity’s Rainbow,” Joyce’s book might seem preening, needlessly erudite, even a little old-fashioned in its naughty bits. Thanks in part to the landmark Woolsey decision, which in 1933 ruled that “Ulysses” was a serious work of literature and not obscene, we can now read books that are far, far racier. (A fascinating detail in Langdon Hammer’s new biography of James Merrill is that one of the people Judge Woolsey turned to for help in reaching his decision was Charles Merrill, the poet’s father and a co-founder of Merrill Lynch. The judge wanted to know how Joyce’s book would strike a “person of average sex instincts.”)

It was mostly the fact of its being banned that brought so much attention to “Ulysses” in the first place, and it’s likely that a lot of the book’s early purchasers never finished it. Even today, when we have supposedly learned how to read it, “Ulysses” is far from a page-turner. On my first attempt, when I was a junior in high school, I gave up after 80 pages or so, and it took me a couple more tries to build up enough steam to make it all the way through. But “Ulysses” is also a book you can never exhaust. Whenever you go back, you find something you hadn’t noticed before — sometimes a joke, a pun, sometimes a heartwarming detail about Bloom, sometimes just a magical phrase like “the heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit.” At a moment when Knausgaard’s inwardly gazing “My Struggle” seems to be our model of the prose epic, the sheer largeness of Joyce’s ambition and scope of his invention seems both inspiring and a little mad — a relic of an era, perhaps, when people believed more trustingly in the power of fiction to remake the world.

Charles McGrath was the editor of the Book Review from 1995 to 2004, and is now a contributing writer for The Times. Earlier he was the deputy editor and the head of the fiction department of The New Yorker. Besides The Times, he has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic and Outside. He is the editor of two golf books — “The Ultimate Golf Book” and “Golf Stories” — and is currently working on an edition of John O’Hara’s stories for the Library of America.