O Homer, Where Art Thou?

O Homer, Where Art Thou? THE LOST BOOKS OF THE ODYSSEY: A NOVEL by ZACHARY MASON Forrar, Straus & Giroux 240 pages, $24

WHAT IF, after ten years of twists and turns on that familiar, winedark sea, Odysseus returns to Ithaca and finds Penelope married, and to a man so unlike himself- a man who never has been, and never will be, a hero?

That is the opening scene of Zachary Mason's beguiling debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, a compendium of fortyfour short, self-contained stories based on Homer's Odyssey (and a few other books, including the Iliad). Here, Polyphemus meditates on his blindness like a philosopher, Telemachus is albino and called "Pale," Achilles is fascinated by other men's wounds, a clay golem is fashioned of that same warrior after his death, and Odysseus declines Athena's marriage proposal with a laugh. In one of the more contrived stories, Mason entertains the Odyssey as "a fantastic parody" of an Achaean treatise on chess in which Odysseus is "inching across the crumbling board toward his home square."

Truly, one of Homer's epithets for Odysseus- poly tropos, literally "of many turns"- can be pinned to Mason's retellings. That adjective also modifies the long literary afterlife of the Odyssey itself, which has become, among other iterations, Ulysses in James Joyce's hands, Omeros in Derek Walcott's, and even O Brother, Where Art Thou? in the Coen brothers'. Mason's version ranks as one of the most mercurial and brooding.

Taking apart and refashioning a classic is a hubristic way to start one's writing career, but, at his best, Mason, by day a computer scientist in Silicon Valley, shows an imagination similar to those of Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges. (The lost book Mason's Polyphemus tells reads as a close echo of Borges' "The House of Asterion," told by...