Metamorphica

Starred review from May 1, 2018
A computer scientist who earned literary renown with The Lost Books of the Odyssey (2010), Mason shows that his novelistic debut was a warm-up for an even more ambitious reimagining of an epic work.Where Odysseus unifies the earlier work (both in Homer and in Mason), Ovid's Metamorphoses and, necessarily, Mason's latest are more sprawling, introducing readers to the likes of Icarus, Midas, Orpheus, and Eurydice, many of whom narrate their own stories, with Mason adding the Roman author himself to the cast of characters. Ovid ends the book exiled from his homeland, his stories in shards, as "some trace their ancestry to the original, but all, by now, are corrupt, little more than florilegia of ghost stories, quotations out of context, fragments of geography. Through the incessant operation of chance some few have come to resemble their original, but there's no way to find them." Amid the loop of time and space, where years pass as waves and centuries are but an eye's blink, the only constant is change, as the title implies. Mason takes his opening epigram from Ovid--"Everything changes, nothing ends"--but later puts those words into the mouth of Dionysos in the dream of his friend Midas, who has transformed the world by introducing money. "I found that money had made the world as mutable as water," he muses. Within this literary world, the likes of Narcissus and Helen of Troy have interior lives, previously unexplored motives, and doubts, though as the cycle of myth proceeds toward its conclusion, the one thing that has never changed is Death, presented here as a friend or lover to some, an enemy to most others, but the fate for all. Amid the shape-shifting throughout this work, there's an immutable quality. "Faces are drawn in water, and names written in dust," according to the renewed mythos. "Even persons are ephemeral--in the end, there's only pattern."Both soaring and deep, this dazzling narrative creates a fictional universe of myth that transcends time itself.

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May 21, 2018
Mason (Void Star) reworks Greek myths into mostly melancholic fragments in this impressive collection of flash fictions that accentuate the pain, frustrations, and regrets of well-known and unfamiliar myths. Each section centers loosely on a single god, showing the ways they debilitated successive family lines and interconnected figures. Athena’s stories float around the edges of The Odyssey, capturing the bleak aftermath of the abandonment of Calypso and revenge of Ajax. The Zeus cycle follows Europa’s lineage, including Minos’s section—a heartbreaking look at his belated anguish for mistreating his friend Daedalus. In the sections for Philemon and Baucis and Daphne, Mason rejects the characters’ traditional transformations into trees to show deeper rewards and punishments. The strongest story of the Nemesis portion has a Clytemnestra bursting with her rage at the sacrifice of her daughter. Alcestis’s section strips away the romance of a wife willing to die in place of her husband, Admetus. Mason mashes Gilgamesh and Theseus together and makes Atalanta a haughty lesbian. It’s heavy but never plodding; readers familiar with Greek mythology will appreciate Mason’s mournful riffs highlighting the darker recesses of mythology.

July 1, 2018

Written in narrative fragments, with robust imagination and deft language, Mason's acclaimed debut novel, The Lost Books of the Odyssey, attempted to unhinge the story of Odysseus from its historically dominated Homeric version. Here, the author reimagines the epic poem Metamorphoses, reconstructing the stories of Orpheus, Persephone, Phaedra, and the rest of the characters in Ovid's magnum opus through his own literary lens. Using constellations as a framing device, Mason writes each account as its own self-contained myth, but in aggregation the stories form imaginary lines that constitute a pattern. The emerging model underscores Ovid's central thesis, the necessity and pain of transformation from identity to form. This thought is echoed in Midas's rumination that gold has no history, only endless transformation into ships and cities. VERDICT Classicists and readers familiar with the Metamorphoses will luxuriate in Mason's imagination and beautiful language, while those unfamiliar with Mason or Ovid might find this novel of narrative fragments an unreadable work of experimental literary conceit. [See Prepub Alert, 1/22/18.]--Joshua Finnell, Colgate Univ., Hamilton, NY

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2018

Mason, who debuted by reimagining the travels and travails of Odysseus in his New York Times best-selling The Lost Books of the Odyssey, now reimagines Ovid's epic poem about ceaseless change. (In between was a second, much-praised novel, Void Star.) Narcissus, Pygmalion and Galatea, Midas and Atalanta, even Ovid himself are all seen in a bright new light.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.