Review: 'The Latinist,' by Mark Prins

The cover of Mark Prins' sparky but flawed debut novel, "The Latinist," depicts in lurid colors Italian baroque sculptor Bernini's celebrated statue of Apollo and Daphne. The effect jars with the picturesqueness of Bernini's marmoreal creation. Yet it aptly captures the sense of the grotesque at the heart of Prins' retelling of the Apollo and Daphne myth as a psychological thriller — with a cat-and-mouse chase.

The obvious reference point for Prins — and for Bernini — is the Roman poet Ovid's "The Metamorphoses," an episodic narrative epic written around 8 A.D. A book about transformation, it tells, among others, the story of Apollo's obsessive pursuit of the nymph Daphne.

Her father Peneus, the river, answers her cry to be saved and turns her into a laurel tree. Traditionally regarded as a tale about love, resistance and art, it raises troubling questions for our present moment about sexual violence and consent, for the sun-god is essentially out to rape Daphne.

Prins' novel calls attention to the cultural normalization of male aggressive behavior as it spins out an absorbing drama about obsession, abuse of power and intimate violence.

"The Latinist" is set in the present day in the fictional Westfaling College at Oxford University. Its hallowed grounds make a surprising setting for a story about academic corruption. In this world where scholars live their real lives in their footnotes, the pursuit of excellence and perversion exist side by side.

Prins gives us Tessa Templeton, an ambitious but vulnerable doctoral student from Florida. A Latin philologist researching the earliest reception of Ovid's poem, Tessa is at the threshold of graduation when she learns from an anonymous e-mail that her supervisor and chair of the classics program, Christopher Eccles, is trying to sabotage her career. The story develops not so much as a whodunit but as a whydunit, and Prins delves deep into Chris and Tessa's pasts as they play out the Apollo-Daphne story of the hunter and the hunted.

The plot turns when, near surrender, Tessa flees to Italy, tracking down a Roman poet Marius Scaeva in an archaeological digging site outside Rome. Tessa believes that an extant fragment by Marius is the first known retelling of Ovid's poem, and it's written from Daphne's perspective to boot. Gimlet-eyed observation and knowledge of Latin prosody help Tessa make a brilliant discovery about Marius that should cement her reputation as a classicist. Prins' erudition is on full display here, but how, the reader wonders, will he return us to the chase motif?

I won't give away how Prins rescues the thread of his story. Suffice it to say that he has crafted a clever faceoff between Tessa and Chris. But then he stretches further the chase into a finale that, unfortunately, falls flat.

Inexplicably, the ending collapses into contempt for the characters. Tessa now engages in kinky sex with Chris. Perhaps Prins' intention is to capture the murky area of consent and choice, but it comes off as farcical. By a bizarre turn of events, Chris ends up in a vegetative state akin to Daphne's fate in the myth.

Academics have long argued that Ovid's depiction of love in the Apollo-Daphne episode is comical and grotesque. Prins has capitalized on this idea, adding twists that would have startled Ovid.

Sharmila Mukherjee's writing has been published or is forthcoming in the Seattle Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, NPR and the Washington Post. She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Washington, Seattle.

The Latinist
By: Mark Prins.
Publisher: W.W. Norton, 352 pages, $26.95.