Myth is one of the fundamental forces in the human universe.
Mythology is a process as vital to human understanding as photosynthesis is to plants. The heat of human interactions is converted by myth into archetypes, whose light illuminates our own lives, renders us understandable to ourselves. His new novel, Honk If You Love Aphrodite , appropriates Homeric verse and Greek gods to tell the story of everyman Stanley Short-Sleeves, who is mysteriously thwarting his own love life. Weiss attempts to create a modern odyssey in the streets of New York, as Stanley and an Olympian friend are harassed, cajoled, misled, threatened, and smothered by lurid New Yorkers who would shipwreck their desperate journey home. But Weiss cannot separate archetype from stereotype, and his cheeky take on modern myth dissolves like wet cardboard into a shambles of broad cultural slurs.