Get lost!

Margaret Atwood bid the old man adieu and turned her attention to Penelope. Along with her "Penelopiad," Canongate Books has compiled a sufficient roster of revived myths -- Atlas and Heracles, Theseus and the Minotaur -- to create a mini-imprint. Then there are the two books here, perhaps unfairly paired: Mason's cryptic novel, "The Lost Books of the Odyssey," and Scott Huler's travelogue, "No-Man's Lands."

It's easy to crib from undergraduate lecture notes and theorize about what Joyce or Pound were up to. We can cite, if forced, reams of bland scholarship on the relationship between modernism and myth, the lust for origins in an era cast adrift. What more convenient figure than lost Odysseus -- hungry for home but not exactly running from Calypso's warm lap -- to stand in for modernity's native ambivalence, its simultaneous disdain for and worship of the past?

But 80 years ago, people still learned Greek in high school. Latin too, poor things. No one reads even the Yellow Pages these days. How can we explain this latest spate of myth-lit? I don't want to sound like a crank -- I'm not sure I miss them -- but in this emoticon age it does seem odd that any of us would bother to dust off the creaky Greeks. Omg, his name was Homer, lol!

I have no ready explanation, except that perhaps we're not as clever as we think. Maybe there are only so many stars, and so many stories. (But there are a lot of stars!) Weirdly, these stories still work for us: a sounding board off which to bounce ourselves, and find ourselves. We find, in these cases, our hunger to be lost, and our banality

Mason un-grounds the Odyssey, often gorgeously, turning Homer's twisting tale into a sermon on indeterminacy. He allows this grand myth of homecoming no beginning or end, just banks of fog, endless mirrors, Borgesian labyrinths. Huler, meanwhile, painfully well-meaning (he comments frequently for National Public Radio), mines the text for suburban life lessons. Hurry, Odysseus, it's time to go!

Let's start with Mason, who's more fun. Like his subject, he's fond of tricks. He hides a Nabokov reference in a spurious "About the Author" paragraph (Mason is not, in fact, "the John Shade Professor of Archaeocryptography and Paleomathematics at Magdalen College, Oxford," but a computer scientist from Palo Alto) and begins with the 21st century version of the manuscript-discovered-in-a-desk gambit.