On an ever spinning wheel
Zachary Mason’s critically praised first novel comes with a largely self-explanatory title: “The Lost Books of the Odyssey” purports to be a compilation of 44 alternate versions of Homer’s epic. What that title cannot possibly convey, though, is the unusual journey of Mr. Mason’s manuscript on its way to publication by Farrar, Straus & Giroux last week.
Mr. Mason, 35, a computer scientist specializing in search recommendation systems and keywords, once worked at Amazon.com. He avoided writing workshops and M.F.A. programs as a matter of principle, and produced “The Lost Books” at night, during lunch breaks and on weekends and vacations. (…)
In person, Mr. Mason is extremely soft-spoken and tends to talk in a flat, unemotional tone, though he does note with regret that he “turned down Google two weeks before their I.P.O.” (He’s now employed at a Silicon Valley start-up.) He approaches literature almost as if it were a branch of science, governed by laws that are quantifiable and predictable, as when he talks of devising an algorithm, later discarded, to determine an optimum chapter order for his novel or when he compares writing to the annealing of metals.
