Gods Behaving Badly

 
Gods Behaving Badly is a new book by Marie Phillips. It was just reviewed in the New York Times [The House of Myth]. Here's a teaser,

Americans have long delighted in movies like ''It's a Wonderful Life,'' ''Heaven Can Wait'' (both the 1943 and 1978 versions) and ''Bruce Almighty'' -- ''divine comedies,'' to borrow the marketing shtick of the day, in which a benevolent male Judeo-Christian God and sometimes his demonic counterpart are represented by stock imagery like billowing clouds, bolts of lightning, bumbling plainclothes angels and horned creatures thumping pitchforks. The humor may be irreverent, but it's always delivered with a basic attitude of respect.

Such deference, a holdover perhaps from the days of the Hays Code, is entirely lacking in Marie Phillips's first novel, ''Gods Behaving Badly,'' in which the 12 major deities of ancient Greece uneasily cohabit in a dilapidated town house in 21st-century London, dwelling just above the city's ''greasy tide'' of human flesh. It's like Hesiod's ''Theogony'' meets MTV's ''Real World.''

In the author's affectionate telling, Zeus, the fading patriarch, is squirreled away on the top floor; Apollo is a horny and malcontented television psychic; and Aphrodite is a phone-sex worker whose buttocks, when she mounts a staircase, resemble ''two hard-boiled eggs dancing a tango'' -- maybe the most original description of the female posterior since Jerry approvingly deemed Sugar Kane's ''Jell-O on springs'' in ''Some Like It Hot.'' Apollo's virginal, pragmatic twin sister, Artemis, walks dogs for a living and jogs compulsively in her spare time. Dionysus owns a nightclub called Bacchanalia and is constantly plugged in to a music player. Meanwhile, Athena has been cast as an efficient boardroom type who distributes handouts to her bored family as she subjects them to streams of corporate gobbledygook.

This sounds like a terrific book. I don't normally read fiction—other than creationist books—but this will be an exception. Has anyone read it?

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