Gods Behaving Badly: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

British blogger Phillips's delightful debut finds the Greek gods and goddesses living in a tumbledown house in modern-day London and facing a very serious problem: their powers are waning, and immortality does not seem guaranteed. In between looking for work and keeping house, the ancient family is still up to its oldest pursuit: crossing and double-crossing each other. Apollo, who has been cosmically bored for centuries, has been appearing as a television psychic in a bid for stardom. His aunt Aphrodite, a phone-sex worker, sabotages him by having her son Eros shoot him with an arrow of love, making him fall for a very ordinary mortal-a cleaning woman named Alice, who happens to be in love with Neil, another nice, retiring mortal. When Artemis-the goddess of the moon, chastity and the hunt, who has been working as a dog walker-hires Alice to tidy up, the household is set to combust, and the fate of the world hangs in the balance. Fanciful, humorous and charming, this satire is as sweet as nectar. (Dec.)
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From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Marie Phillips's first novel, Gods Behaving Badly, hovers somewhere between Pride and Prejudice and an episode of "Bewitched." I'm not complaining; I have an unusually high regard for Elizabeth Montgomery's oeuvre. And Austen got off some good lines, too.

Phillips lives in London and studied anthropology at Cambridge, but now she's following that great British tradition of high-brow silliness with a story that suggests the gods must be crazy. The premise of her sentimental sex-romp is that the Greek divinities are still alive, but barely. They're holed up in a London townhouse that they bought for a song 350 years ago during the plague. But they've let it run to Hades, and there's only so much even a crafty god like Hephaestus can do when none of the others will so much as hang up a toga. As usual, these 12 unearthly, egotistical roommates bicker and complain and plot revenge. But believe me, it's a long way down from Ovid; closer to what MTV might call "The Divine World."

The more you remember of Edith Hamilton's Mythology, the more you'll snicker (or groan) at all this, but even if you think Hermes is a scarf designer, don't worry: Phillips lightly fills in the necessary details along the way. Aphrodite earns money as a phone-sex worker. Artemis is a dog walker. Dionysus runs a sleazy bar. And forget Bernini's vision of Apollo pursuing Daphne as she turns into a laurel tree. Nowadays, the hunky deity cruises for sex in Hampstead Heath and routinely ravishes his half-sister in their fetid bathroom.

Part of the comedy here is Phillips's musings on the state of religious faith. The gods, "terribly weakened over time," are suffering the effects of being unwanted, unneeded. People don't believe anymore, or they've fallen in with various heresies. "If it wasn't for Jesus," Artemis complains, "I'd probably still be living on Olympus, running on the hillsides." My God, even Eros has fallen under the spell of that famous carpenter. Bickering with Aphrodite, the petulant boy whines, "I wish the Virgin Mary was my mother." The only thing worse than these humiliations is the endless boredom they have to endure, and that turns out to be their Achilles heel.

While taping the pilot episode of his new psychic TV show, Apollo spots a cleaning lady in the studio and falls hopelessly in love. (Eros has a hand -- or arrow -- in this, of course.) The object of Apollo's affection is Alice Mulholland, a plain, modest young woman who can't imagine why a handsome TV star would be interested in her. And besides, her heart belongs to equally virginal Neil, a geeky engineer who shares her love of crossword puzzles. On the outside, it doesn't look like a particularly fair fight: Apollo is the god of the sun; Neil is good at Scrabble.

The real fun begins when Alice is hired for the Sisyphean task of cleaning the gods' house. She can't complain about the salary, but the owners are strange. "She tried not to judge them; they were Greek, after all, and all families had their own ways." Although Apollo has lots of time to woo Alice as she moves from one calamitous room to another, his technique has grown rusty over the centuries: "It is a beautiful name," he tells her, "especially considering that it contains the word lice."

Miraculously, she resists his advances, even when he plays the pity card: "We were . . . famous once," he tells her. "Everyone knew who we were. People were different then. They believed. The adulation, the fame, it was like -- well, it was worship, really. We lived in a palace -- I wish you could have seen it, Alice! The fountains, the pleasure gardens, nymphs gliding gracefully through the forest -- I never looked at them, of course. We had everything, literally everything. Can you imagine it?"

"It sounds nice," Alice says.

Spurned in love and frustrated about losing his power, Apollo lashes out in a way that threatens not only Alice but the whole world. Is lowly Neil ready for the Herculean challenge that the Fates have placed before him? Can this family of gods put aside their differences long enough to regain their former glory?

The tension doesn't ratchet too high; it's a romantic comedy, after all. The key is to fly through a book like this very fast -- on Hermes' wings. But Phillips has an Olympian sense of absurdity, and there's enough ambrosial wit here to seduce most mortals for an afternoon or two on the divan.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company (December 10, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316067628
• ISBN-13: 978-0316067621
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (154 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #289,061 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sitcom of the Gods, December 16, 2007

By	bensmomma "bensmomma" (Ann Arbor, Michigan) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

I just read that Ben Stiller's production company has optioned "Gods" for development as a TV series; I hope this hysterically funny yet sweet-tempered farce is not destroyed by a sitcom mentality.

In "Gods Behaving Badly," the gods of Olympus have been holed up in a decrepit London flat for almost 400 years of decay. Forced to make a living, Aphrodite turns to phone sex, Artemis walks dogs on Hampstead Heath, Dionysus runs a sleazy bar, and Apollo has a lame fortune-telling show on cable TV. Eros (Cupid) shoots Apollo with love's arrow, and his lusty gaze falls on poor timid Alice, a cleaning lady attending the show with Neil, a structural engineer who secretly loves her. In pursuit of Alice, Apollo comes close to destroying the world, and nerdish Neil must descend into the Underworld to rescue Alice (and the world) from death.

This *does* I admit sound like a sitcom premise; what rescues "Gods Behaving Badly" is the author's witty dialogue and almost romantic sympathy for her characters - even the naughty ones. Apollo's pursuit of little Alice has a kind of Marx-Brothers manic frenzy to it, and for bawdy comedy the book rivals Christopher Moore (one of my favorite authors), but with a more coherent plot, believe it or not. Read it before television gets hold of it!

22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Gods behaving sadly, October 12, 2007

By	camille (Chicago) - See all my reviews

(What's this?)

This book's back cover blurb includes a review calling it 'hilarious.' I must have a different sense of humor than that reviewer, because I found little about the book that was amusing. The book was well-written, had swiftly but well-drawn charcters and a promising and clever premise of ancient gods living a modern life. Nonetheless, the overwhelming feeling evoked by the book was one of sadness.

The Olympian gods are living degraded existences in which all of life's moments, even sex, are desultory and boring. Their lives are boring and boring, therefore, to read. The two main human characters are both stunted emotionally and while their small lives are somewhat poignant, they do not inspire humor or in fact, anything more than pity. Nonetheless, the humans find heroism in themselves and manage to restore themselves and the gods to their rightful place through selflessness and courage.

This book is a good moral tale if one enjoys sad and dark stories. But hilarious? No.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The Gods Must Be Crazy, September 29, 2007

By	Eon (Rhode Island) - See all my reviews

(What's this?)

I wanted to like this book. Oh, how I wanted to like this book. And in the beginning, I actually did. It started out interesting and quirky, with a few hilarious lines.

And then it slooooooooooooowed down. The pace went from 60 to 0 in the space of mere pages. The humor faded more effectively and at a quicker rate than the powers of the gods in the book. We're then treated to a lot of tedious details about the lives of the gods and two of the most boring mortals on the planet.
Was there anyone interesting here? Hermes, perhaps. And Eros, just a bit; a Greek god turned Christian? How's that for weird. The other gods largely lack personality except for that dictated by their deistic functions, unfortunately. And the mortal heroes, Neil and Alice...Look, "ordinary" does not have to equal "mindnumbingly boring". But Neil and Alice are boring, so boring that they're not very sympathetic.

The plot has been done before, and better. Not that it wasn't a cute idea, but the execution is lousy and by the end it all feels so contrived. The ending picks up a tiny bit, but not enough to make up for the atrociously slow pace of the majority of the book.
The writing style itself isn't horrible, but it's far from great. Pages of dialog are poorly balanced against gigantic paragraphs of description and the ponderings of god and mortal alike. Some paragraphs are so large that they take up whole pages; they really should have been broken down more. Worst of all...do writers these days turn off their spellcheckers? Sure, typos happen, but how the heck do you misspell "smell" if you have a spellchecker on?

I promised myself that no matter what, I was going to be honest. And so I am. I didn't like it and honestly wouldn't recommend it.