Son of Nobody

The novel operates on two parallel levels. On the top half of each page, fragments of a reconstructed Greek epic called The Psoad tell the story of Psoas of Midea, an ordinary soldier at the Trojan War. On the bottom half, footnotes and annotations reveal the personal story of the narrator, Harlow Donne, a Canadian Homeric scholar who addresses his young daughter Helen throughout. The two narratives mirror and illuminate each other, building toward a shared reckoning with loss.

In an Author's Note, Harlow recounts discovering six ostraka, or pottery fragments, at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, dating to roughly 710 BCE and inscribed in boustrophedon, a style of early Greek writing that alternates direction line by line. He deciphered the inscription: "I am here because of Psoas of Midea son of nobody." He recalls his grandfather, a Vietnam War veteran with Parkinson's disease, who told him, "We are hiding places for monsters," a remark that later drew Harlow to Homer's Iliad as "the original hiding place for monsters."

The story proper begins when Harlow, a graduate student, receives a scholarship to Oxford. His wife, Gail, an executive at a meat-packing company, challenges the move, asking who will look after Helen. Harlow proposes that time apart might help their troubled marriage, but their arguments follow a familiar pattern: small resentments multiplying into full constellations of accusation. At the airport, Gail offers only a cheek to kiss and whispers, "Don't come back" (28).

At Oxford, Harlow works under Professor Franklin Cubitt, an imperious eighty-three-year-old papyrologist. Cubitt assigns him to catalog papyri from Oxyrhynchus, an ancient Egyptian town whose dryness preserved centuries of discarded Greek writing. Two weeks in, Harlow discovers scraps containing the phrase "arrived Psoas, the son of nobody," matching the Ashmolean ostraka despite a separation of nine hundred years and a thousand kilometers. Psoas does not appear in Homer, and his hometown of Midea is absent from The Iliad. Cubitt dismisses the find, but further evidence, including a Venetian chrestomathy (a Latin compilation for teaching Greek), confirms an unknown Trojan War tradition. Harlow names it The Psoad.

As Harlow assembles fragments, the epic takes shape. The Greek fleet's arrival at Troy is catastrophic: The Trojans have planted sharp underwater stakes in their harbor, sinking over sixty ships. Psoas devises a solution, but the Greek hero Odysseus steals the credit. A merchant provides Agamemnon, the Greek high king, with intelligence about Troy's geography, only to be thrown into the sea for his unwelcome expertise. From the start, The Psoad foregrounds commoners whose knowledge sustains the war effort while kings blunder and claim glory.

The siege grinds on for ten years, marked by lice, despair, and death. A Phrygian carpenter named Elanthius tells Psoas about his family table, once surrounded on all four sides, now emptied by death and departure. He gives Psoas the table and asks for a quick death. Psoas obliges but cannot carry the table away. A recurring refrain captures the soldiers' anguish: "always the heart lay undressed and unprotected" (122).

The epic's central antagonism develops between Psoas and Prince Mestor, one of King Priam's fifty sons. In their first encounter, Mestor insults Psoas's wife and dismisses him as beneath notice. In later meetings, Mestor delivers extended speeches mocking Psoas while taunting, "Yet I am no more of a man than you are" (180). When Psoas shouts back, "I am no less of a man than you are" (178), the entire battlefield falls silent. Such a claim by a commoner against a prince is almost unintelligible to the ancient world.

In a key scene, Thersites, the only commoner who speaks in Homer's Iliad, delivers a bitter rant against Agamemnon and is brutally beaten by Odysseus. Psoas alone tends Thersites's wounds for three days. Harlow identifies Thersites as the original bard of The Psoad, "one son of nobody singing of another" (157), explaining the epic's coarser language and its celebration of common soldiers.

Throughout, Harlow's footnotes trace his family's disintegration. Helen refuses to speak to him, furious that he will miss her birthday. Gail communicates only in terse emails. When Helen does call, she observes that The Iliad sounds like her parents: "So it's like you and Mommy" (81). Cubitt, who lost his own son, tells Harlow, "Go home, man, go home" (119). Harlow stays.

Then Helen falls ill. Gail calls from the hospital in a panic as Helen's condition rapidly worsens. Harlow watches on his phone as doctors work over his daughter's body, but mostly he sees walls, legs, and a tube in her mouth. Gail drops the phone. When she picks it up again, the doctors stand silent around Helen's motionless body. Helen has died of influenza, her lungs filled with fluid. Harlow did not answer Gail's first calls because his phone was silenced in the library.

Rather than fly home, Harlow stays at Oxford to finish The Psoad, asking Gail to delay the funeral. Gail is furious: "Your daughter, by the way, wouldn't give a fuck about your stupid Greek epic" (276). Harlow acknowledges the parallel to Agamemnon, who sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia so the Greek fleet could sail, then got back to work.

In the epic's climax, Psoas and Mestor finally fight. Mestor destroys Psoas's shield and sword. Psoas strips naked and stands unarmed. Unable to strike him, Mestor also strips, and they fight bare-handed until Psoas kills him. Psoas mutilates the corpse, shouting that Mestor insulted his wife, "whom I love just as much as you loved yours" (271). The entire central action traces back to Mestor's throwaway insult from their first meeting. The god Hades appears and articulates the epic's central philosophical claim: "If they die equal, why should they not live equal?" (279).

The Greeks breach Troy's gate not with a wooden horse but with four elephants, gifts of King Memnon of Aethiopia, who tear the gate from its hinges. The sacking is merciless. Psoas wanders through burning Troy and finds Mestor's residence, where five bodies hang from a beam: Mestor's wife and four children, including the youngest boy, "curled like a hand of bananas on a hook" (327).

Psoas carries the boy's body out of Troy and descends alive into the Underworld. He gives the child to Hades, saying, "Here, my lord, here is the flesh of death" (330). Hades, unmoved by countless deaths, weeps at the sight of a dead child and declares, "I must die" (331). Psoas remains in the Underworld, undead, while Thersites returns home to his family.

In Canada, Gail drives Harlow not home but to a funeral home, where Helen's body has been stored in a freezer for nine weeks. In the basement mortuary, Harlow sees his daughter's bluish-gray face under a cream-colored sheet. Over her body, he and Gail erupt into the worst argument of their lives. Gail screams at him to get out and drives away, leaving his suitcases in the parking lot. Helen's ashes are later divided in two, mirroring the novel's split pages and the broken marriage.

Harlow advances his central thesis: Hades' declaration "I must die," born from a mortal's grief, traveled through Greek-speaking intermediaries to produce the concept of an embodied, suffering god: Jesus of Nazareth. "Jesus came from the incurable lassitude of a Greek soldier at Troy. From death eternal to life eternal" (331–332). Cubitt's complaints lead to Harlow's expulsion from his doctoral program. He now lives in a basement apartment, teaching adults who struggle with literacy.

The novel closes by circling back to its beginning. Harlow imagines Helen in the doorway in her pajamas. She asks for a story, "the one about the broken pot," and he says, "All right. Come sit here next to me" (334), returning to the broken ostraka of the opening page: a broken man and the story he tells his lost daughter.