The Odyssey, not a novel

In a Wall Street Journal blog, Alexandra Cheney reports on Wednesday’s Odyssey/Ulysses reading in Manhattan:

Last night Stephen Colbert, Marian Seldes, Barbara Feldon and Stephen Lang, to name a few, found themselves in front of a sold-out audience reading from both Ulysses and Homer’s Odyssey, the theme being the parallels between the two landmark novels.

The Odyssey has been called the first novel (for its complexities of character and narrative), but it is not a novel. It is an epic poem. Ulysses, that’s a novel.