American Odyssey &
The Odyssey

R. Douglas Clark
Homer
Samuel Butler, translator

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About American Odyssey

In millennia long past, Ulysses battled the fates to return to the home and family he loved.

Little changes.

Now, Leo Lewis—though his war was in Afghanistan, not Troy—finds the same gods and goddesses arrayed behind him and against him.

In spirited writing both sly and sublime, R. Douglas Clark captures the essence of the warrior’s journey. Today’s way home lies not across the Mediterranean but instead becomes the great American road trip—towns unknown, adventures unimagined, people strange and loving. As mortals shape Leo’s experiences for better or worse, so, too, do the gods.

The novel is an original, one man’s struggle to find a way for the byroads of the continent to heal his horrors and deal with his demons. As it unfolds, Clark’s tale of this solitary, damaged Marine becomes the story of a million other veterans taking the “long drive home.”

Tested by a pantheon of self-serving yet sometimes-compassionate gods, Leo finds a journey full of twists and turns, with the abiding lesson that no one should presume to know his own fate—and survival is just as uncertain as it ever was amid the combat and chaos of Kandahar.

About The Odyssey

The Trojan War is over. The victorious heroes have returned home—except for Ulysses. For he has incurred the wrath of mighty Poseidon, and the god of the seas and storms will have his revenge.

Trapped in the lovely clutches of the beautiful nymph Calypso, captive of the giant Cyclops Polyphemus, compelled to journey into Hades—Ulysses struggles on for ten long years, while home in Ithaca, suitors for the hand of his wife Penelope have taken over his palace and feast on his wealth.

It is a tale that has survived through the ages, driven by the power of its story and the fascination of the interplay among its characters, both human and divine, all brought vitally to life in this translation by noted author and classical scholar Samuel Butler.

Preview of American Odyssey


The next day, Leo drove to Fort Morgan, Alabama, where he caught a ferry to Dauphin Island. Hermes the Messenger leaned against the boat’s railing. He had put himself in the neon colors and snug-fitting clothes of a bicycle racer, with shoes that appeared to be equipped with wings. Next to him stood Leo, watching a pelican: two fit young men savoring the breeze.

“I like ferries ’cause they force me to slow down,” said Hermes. “Most of the time, I’m racing here and there from place to place, never stopping to enjoy the ride. ’Course if I did stop, I wouldn’t be riding anymore, would I? Is that a paradox or is it irony?”

This was too much for Leo. “Where ya headed?” he asked.

“Don’t know yet. Memphis is nearby, but I could be dispatched to Buenos Aires or Helsinki.”

“Helsinki? What kind of business are you in?”

“Communications. It’s the Communication Age, you know.”

“So I’ve heard. We’re all connected instantly. Is there anything you can’t do with a cell phone?”

“We’re slaves to the satellites. Telepathy is much more reliable, though dreams work just as well.”

“For what?”

“Communicating, instant messaging. Just put me on the Dream Express, and I’ll deliver the news.”

“Dreams are normal, I suppose, but what do nightmares mean?”

“I don’t deal in meaning; I’m just the messenger. You have nightmares?” Hermes asked, knowing the answer well.

“Once in a while I do.”

“Yeah, like every night, I’ll bet. You’re probably afraid to go to sleep.”

Leo gave him a hard stare.

“I have a suggestion, my friend,” Hermes said. “I know a woman not too far from here. She’s a healer, among other things. Maybe she could help you.”

“You mean a shrink?”

“No, man, a healer. She’s got special powers.”

“Heals the sick, raises the dead?”

“Hey, this is straight from the fridge, dude. She can weave spells, call down curses, cast out demons, turn men to swine if that’s what she wants.”

“Reads tea leaves and Tarot cards?”

“No doubt. Circe’s got a deep connection with the spirit world.”

“Voodoo? Are you saying she’s a voodoo queen?”

“It might be voodoo, or maybe she’s a psychic. All I can say is that she knows what’s going on underneath, deep down in your soul.”

Leo had nothing to say to that. After a while, he asked, “Where can I find this Circe?”

“She lives outside a little town called Aiaia in Louisiana. It’s near Beaux Bridge on Bayou Teche. Go at night. Look for a blue light in the window five miles west of town.”

The ferry had reached the dock, and Hermes put his helmet on.

“Good luck,” he said. “Catch you on the flip side.” And he was off.

Preview of The Odyssey

I had hardly finished telling everything to the men before we reached the island of the two Sirens, for the wind had been very favorable. Then, all of a sudden, it fell dead calm, with no breath of wind nor a ripple upon the water, so the men furled the sails and stowed them; then, taking to their oars, they whitened the water with the foam they raised in rowing. Meanwhile, I look a large wheel of wax and cut it up small with my sword. Then I kneaded the wax in my strong hands till it became soft, which it soon did between the kneading and the rays of the sun-god, son of Hyperion. Then I stopped the ears of all my men, and they bound me hands and feet to the mast as I stood upright on the crosspiece; but they went on rowing themselves. When we had got within earshot of the land, and the ship was going at a good rate, the Sirens saw that we were getting inshore and began with their singing.

“Come here,” they sang, “renowned Ulysses, honor to the Achaean name, and listen to our two voices. No one ever sailed past us without staying to hear the enchanting sweetness of our song—and he who listens will go on his way not only charmed but also wiser, for we know all the ills that the gods laid upon the Argives and Trojans before Troy, and can tell you everything that is going to happen over the whole world.”

They sang these words most musically, and as I longed to hear them further, I made clear by frowning to my men that they should set me free; but they quickened their stroke, and Eurylochus and Perimedes bound me with still stronger bonds till we had got out of hearing of the Sirens’ voices. Then my men took the wax from their ears and unbound me.


* * *

Then we entered the straits in great fear of mind, for on the one hand was Scylla, and on the other dread Charybdis kept sucking up the salt water. As she vomited it up, it was like the water in a cauldron when it is boiling over upon a great fire, and the spray reached the top of the rocks on either side. When she began to suck again, we could see the water all inside whirling round and round, and it made a deafening sound as it broke against the rocks. We could see the bottom of the whirlpool all black with sand and mud, and the men were at their wits’ ends for fear. While we were taken up with this, and were expecting each moment to be our last, Scylla pounced down suddenly upon us and snatched up my six best men. I was looking at once after both ship and men, and in a moment, I saw their hands and feet ever so high above me, struggling in the air as Scylla was carrying them off, and I heard them call out my name in one last despairing cry. As a fisherman, seated, spear in hand, upon some jutting rock throws bait into the water to deceive the poor little fishes, then spears them with the ox’s horn with which his spear is shod, throwing them gasping onto the land as he catches them one by one—even so did Scylla land these panting creatures on her rock and munch them up at the mouth of her den while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony. This was the most sickening sight that I saw throughout all my voyages.

About R. Douglas Clark

R. Douglas Clark is a small business entrepreneur, father, baseball fan, and musician who grew up in Colorado and Oregon and now lives on a raspberry farm in Chimayó, New Mexico. After 25 years as a Eugene, Oregon, business owner, he moved in 2002 to Chimayó, where he ran the local Boys and Girls Club before retiring a second time and shifting his main focus to fiction—resulting now in his first novel, American Odyssey.

About Homer

Homer was the ancient bard who gave Western literature the works we call The Iliad and The Odyssey—if he ever existed.

While no proven facts document the life of a historical person named Homer—and even the question of a single author for the tales has been debated for centuries—there is no disputing the power of the stories and the fascination of the interplay among its characters, both human and divine.

The man we call Homer, unquestionably the greatest of the Greek epic poets, is believed to have lived in the eastern Mediterranean early in the millennium before the Christian Era. Over the centuries, he often has been characterized as a blind beggar wandering among the towns and cities of his world, singing at their rites and festivals.

Whatever the reality, though, about the author of The Odyssey—whom Samuel Butler even theorized was really a young Sicilian woman—the work itself is the unrivaled culmination of the great ancient tradition of oral story-telling. Through the countless forms and languages it has survived in, The Odyssey continues to speak for itself. Almost three thousand years later, we hail its creator!

About the translator, Samuel Butler

There is no pigeonhole for Samuel Butler.

He is remembered for the Utopian satire Erewhon (“Nowhere” almost spelled backward) and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh. But he was equally known among fellow Victorian iconoclasts for his studies of Christian orthodoxy, evolutionary thought, Italian art, and literary history and criticism. In addition, his prose translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey are used and admired to this day.

But perhaps his most singular contribution to creative thought was his theory that the author of The Odyssey (but not The Iliad) was in reality a young Sicilian woman, and that the land it describes is actually the coast of Sicily and its nearby islands. Butler’s “evidence” for this idea formed the basis of The Authoress of the Odyssey (published in 1897) and was addressed as well in the introduction and footnotes to his translation of The Odyssey.

Summing up this varied and yet deeply intellectual career, a 1932 biographer wrote: “Satirist, novelist, artist and critic that he was, he was primarily a philosopher.” Over the course of his life-span’s many works, Samuel Butler left behind for us a wealth of treasures, and the unique vision he created of Homer’s great epic is prime among them.

Praise for American Odyssey

All time is simultaneous, some philosophers posit. In American Odyssey, Doug Clark drolly turns a Marine returning from Afghanistan into a modern Ulysses. During his journey home, Leo Lewis encounters Athena, Poseidon, and a pantheon of other sometimes-cranky Greeks. Clark’s writing in this spirited novella is sly and sublime— and you can’t top his cast of characters.”
—Robert Mayer,
Author of The Origin of Sorrow, and eight other books
__________

Combine the American legend of the great road trip with the Greek epic of Ulysses returning from the Trojan War and you get an original: a novel about an Afghanistan War veteran using the byroads of the continent to heal his horrors and deal with his demons. The tale of this Marine is the story of a million other war veterans taking the “long drive home.
--Wally Gordon, 
Author of A Reporter’s World: Passions, Places, and People
__________

Like Odysseus returning from the Trojan War, Leo Lewis, stressed-out Marine survivor of a long tour in Afghanistan, returns to his estranged wife and young son. But first comes a solo car trip across an America that’s different from the one he left, where survival now is just as uncertain as combat in Kandahar. Tested by a pantheon of self-serving yet sometimes compassionate gods, Leo’s  journey is full of twists and turns, with the abiding lesson that no one should presume to know his own fate. Evocatively written and bursting with insights.
--Michael French, 
Author of The Reconstruction of Wilson Ryder, and 22 other books
__________

Doug Clark presents us with a whimsical juxtaposition of Homer’s language and our own. Having finished his service as a Marine in Afghanistan, Leo Lewis sets out on a road trip across America back to his wife and a young son he has never met, but Nausicaa and Circe set out to lure him, and the Greek gods watch for ways to help or hinder him. Although Leo despises the materialism and hedonism of the companions he meets, can he expect anything more? Leo’s odyssey highlights the alienation and isolation of trying to find one’s way to a home one hardly knows.
--Claudia Hauer, 
Professor of Classics,
St. John’s College

Praise for The Odyssey

I’m so sick and tired of my kids all blaming each other when something goes wrong in the world. It’s good to have Homer’s reliable information so I can settle their little spats and get back to bed with Hera.
—Zeus
_________

Thanks a lot, Homer. I’m sure glad you kept me up to date on what was taking Ulysses so long. I knew he should have been home sooner after that awful war, especially with a hot chick like Penelope waiting for him. I really feel sorry for the poor guy—and he’s such a hunk too!
—Helen of Troy
_________

Boy, and I thought my twelve labors were tough. At least they didn’t take ten years like that Ulysses dude. He sure saw a lot of action—just the way I like things—and Homer really can tell it like it is. I can’t wait for the sequel.
—Hercules