Ancient of Days

Under the Covers with Justin Bauer

by Justin Bauer

There are a limited number of plots. This old truism, much-loved by dusty comparative lit professors, always opens a lecture. They tell you there are only four, or eight, or maybe just one single plot repeated over all of world literature. And then, depending on the professor, they'll tell you that these plots were laid out, first or best, by Aristotle, Shakespeare or maybe even Homer.

In some classrooms, this is enough: The ancients did most things first, if not quite as fast or flashily as the moderns. A better version of this lecture might make the point that an enormous amount of variety springs out of this very restricted collection of plot elements. But the best version comes from Zachary Mason, whose The Lost Books of the Odyssey (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Feb. 2) illustrates the power of form and style to create infinite variation.

Mason's delightful, inventive collection takes the raw materials of Homer — wily Odysseus, faithful Penelope, wrathful Poseidon — and then recombines, warps and twists elements of his well-worn tale. Mason examines, and sometimes exhausts, the possibilities of the epic's crucial scenes. Odysseus' final return to Ithaca, for instance, plays out with the hero as impostor, with the wife as unfaithful, with the island deserted, and with Homer's supporting cast in leading roles. The preface makes this seem like garden-variety postmodern exercise, but Mason's quick to introduce uncertainty. At one point, the stories are framed as rediscovered fragments. Later, they become whispered-down-the-lane fables: "Odysseus, finding that his reputation for trickery preceded him, started inventing histories for himself ... [with] the unexpected effect that one of his lies became, with minor variations, the Odyssey of Homer."

The book carefully balances its explanations, ensuring none of these backstories entirely contradicts another. The credit for this fluid state of doubt, though, lies less with Mason's subject than with his style, which embraces the mythic and epic elements of his source materials and transforms them through wide-eyed simplicity. His prose accepts the strangeness of mythology, the alien heroes and monsters, their iterations and recursions, as simple fact.

This impact of style on subject, or form on meaning, comes into even sharper focus with newer plots. Mason looks backward to myth, but through confronting cutting-edge scientific and ethical questions in ripped-from-peer-review novels, Richard Powers and Rebecca Newberger Goldstein look resolutely forward. Powers' Generosity: An Enhancement (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Sept. 19) scrutinizes genetics, tackling the ethical dimensions of the debate; Goldstein's 36 Arguments for the Existence of God (Pantheon, Jan. 12) begins with logical proofs for atheism, but embraces mathematical probability, pure mathematics and gerontology, too. Even as Powers and Goldstein both work in the tradition of a novel of ideas, alien in subject and concern to the Greeks, there's still a great gap between the way each tells their story.

Generosity is the latest from Powers, who has spent his career muddling music, computer science, genetics and neurology together in fiction. He usually adopts the two-track plot of a thriller, having his characters solve an abstract scientific problem — here, discovering and deciphering the biological base of happiness — while, of course, falling in love. If Powers' plotting is schematic, counterpointing his two storylines, he is at least aware of it. He tells his readers how the book will end "You know this story: Thassa will be taken away from him." It's as if by sweeping aside the tension in the plot he can devote more attention to parsing the ethics of gene splicing.

Goldstein follows precisely the opposite path. 36 Arguments does not lack erudition: There are long disquisitions on the prisoner's dilemma and on Kabbalistic numerology, sometimes even delivered by stock characters like the gray-suited conservative demagogue who faithlessly advocates for the Almighty. Nonetheless, her book is a complex confection for a novel of ideas. It's written in 36 chapters, with titles like "The Argument from the View from Nowhere," with an appendix of supporting logical proofs, and it's about a psychologist who has himself written a book disproving the existence of God, containing in turn an appendix with 36 logical proofs.

All the care and self-awareness that Goldstein has coded into her novel elevates and amplifies her subject, leavening the dry philosophy and grounding her flights of fancy. Like Mason, Goldstein is aware of the power of variation and the elegance of recursion. Taken together, these stylist inventions show the bounty that can come out of a mere eight plots. Or four. Or one.

(j_bauer@citypaper.net)