Book Alert / Gods Behaving Badly -- A Novel

Gods Behaving Badly -- A Novel by Marie Phillips, Little, Brown '07, $23.99, 293 pages, ISBN #0316067628.

You may have thought those Greek gods you studied about in college -- the ones enshrined in marble, with blank, staring eyes -- are dead. Actually, they've just gone underground and are alive and ("well" is perhaps too strong a word) in a London townhouse that has seen better days. Aphrodite, Goddess of Love, works as a phone sex operator; Apollo, God of Prophecy, is a TV psychic; and Zeus, King of the Gods, is their landlord; so you see they haven't entirely abandoned their original skillsets.

At least this is the premise of Marie Phillips's debut novel, which has received the kind of enthusiastic reviews given by book reviewers starved for new premises. Since the gods are living in our time, not theirs, they "dabble in the lives of mortals." A for instance: "Aphrodite convinces her son, Eros, to shoot Apollo with an arrow that makes him fall in love with the first woman he sees -- a young mortal named Alice, a cleaning lady." Such set-ups yield frivolous and sometimes lusty hilarity.