The Value of Ambiguity

Page 20 American Book Review The value of ambiGuiTy John Domini The losT Books of The oDYsseY Zachary Mason Starcherone Books http://www.starcherone.com 228 pages; paper, $16.00 More than a generation has passed since Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (English trans. 1974) set a new literary standard for disruption, gamesmanship, and transcendence. The novel was a cat’s cradle, weaving together conversation and meditation, history and high math and myth, all in form never seen before yet coming off like a classic, as natural as “once upon a time.” Fairytales indeed were one of Calvino’s sources—but more fascinating is how his story-surrogate has itself become a source, these days, widely imitated among the English and Americans. “Calvinoesque” has entered our critical lexicon, crowding up behind “Kafkaesque” and “Nabokovian,” meaning a highly imaginative prose work built more of theme and variations than of narrative . Examples range from Gilbert Sorrentino’s rueful hatchet jobs (the brilliant Lunar Follies [2005]) to Alan Lightman’s cuddly pop variation, Einstein’s Dreams (1992). So too, Carole Maso brought off a lovely dance of eros and memory, in Aureole (2003), and it’s Maso who must be thanked for the latest offspring of Invisible Cities. She selected Zachary Mason’s The Lost Books of the Odyssey as the prizewinner in the Starcherone Books contest. But while we might recognize the form and materials of Lost Books, with its piecemeal configuration , its close knit of appropriations from cultures actual and made up, nonetheless we’ve never read another novel like it. Mason appears to have previously published nothing more than a couple of online excerpts from this same book—though research can be deceptive, since the author’s indulging in a literary version of Where’s Waldo? More on that later; on first encounter, what matters is the masterly balance of the interlocked mosaic he’s constructed, and the miniaturist’s skill he demonstrates with every piece. I’ve rarely come across such an assertive debut, at once a game brought off winningly and a disturbing vision beyond all fair play. The timeless elements are those of Homer. We have a hero skilled with tongue, sword, and phallus; we have the wrath of the ocean-god Poseidon and the warrior Achilles, the loyalty of the wisdom-godAthena and the wife Penelope. Then comes the postmodern collage, enabled by a pair of splendid inventions. First, this author posits the lost books themselves, composed by a sect called “the Homerids” and “known only in encrypted form,” and second, he imagines a recent breakthrough in “archeocryptography,” working from a “mimeograph of the British Museum copy…itself an early Renaissance copy of a (most likely) Roman copy.” This much is explained by Mason’s Mr. Chips, in a parody introduction that goes down easy and concludes with the obvious: “mysteries remain.” Among those mysteries is how recurrent topics like “Words” or “The Gods,” which number eleven, can be parceled out evenly among fourty-six decoded Books (the number of squares on a chess-board, inverted). We begin undone, informed yet ignorant. I’ve rarely come across such an assertive debut, at once a game brought off winningly and a disturbing vision beyond all fair play. We begin, that is, as much shaken as charmed, and it would be wrong to present this novel as purely playful. Invisible Cities, after all, horrifies us with the stench of the urban inferno as much as it entertains us with the strutwork of the Fibonacci series. So too, throughout the Lost Books, the reversals and ironies raise a chill. Reversal is the theme, and I daresay this Odyssey comes up with more ways of eradicating identity than a ten-years’ war. A few of the extrapolations out of conflict and return occupy a single page; more commonly, they run on for four or five, but in all of them, king and usurper, monster and hero, the quick and the dead trade places. A number of times, by turning tables, an alternative Odysseus will arrive at a happy ending. But nothing here constitutes simple reassurance, the restoration of the old order. Carole Maso, in her endorsement, describes this author’s...