Ironically, the Greeks and Romans were pretty goth. As a Roman tombstone tells us, “We are, and we were, nothing. See, reader, how quickly us mortals come from nothing and return to nothing.” Okay, maybe that’s a little long for a Hot Topic t-shirt, but how about this one? Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — “I was not, then I was, now I’m not, I don’t care.”
The Greeks got in on this fatalism too. As Horace quipped, Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit — Rome may have conquered Greece militarily, but Greece conquered Rome intellectually, so it’s no wonder the two shared a similarly miserable eschatology. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, which Aristotle extolled as tragedy’s apotheosis, concludes, in Robert Fagles’ translation, with the thesis “count no man happy till he dies, free of pain at last.” Here, Sophocles echoes Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in which the ill-fated, voted-most-likely-to-become-a-pincushion-in-the-next-10-minutes king of Mycenae Agamemnon declares, “[C]all no man blest until he ends his life in peace, fulfilled.” A chorus laments how “no man can go through life and reach the end unharmed. Aye, trouble is now, and trouble still to come.” Hope is something you chasten yourself for “fawning on . . . control yourself. Don’t lose yourself in joy!”
Hopelessness about the afterlife runs parallel to hopelessness about the gods, and the Greeks and Romans were under no illusions as to how much the gods cared about the average Iosephus. Even Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI, arguably the most chipper Roman eschatology, renders the rolling hills and cool waters of Elysium about as thrilling as a Florida retirement home — and the only way out is to queue up to erase your memories and reincarnate to serve Rome again in an eternal time loop. Even death can’t free you from your duties to the state. In this afterlife, Virgil tells us, the gods are elsewhere — and it’s not even possible to see the stars. Virgil isn’t alone here, as Aeschylus’ chorus declares incredulously: “A god . . . and moved with love?” But Apollo, the god in question, isn’t moved with love — it is Cassandra the chorus speaks to, the princess of Troy taken as a war prize by Agamemnon and cursed with the “gift” of prophecy for refusing Apollo’s advances. Favor from the gods is either petty revenge or predicated entirely on your doing what they want, a purely transactional power relationship.
Any authentic adaptation of the classical imagination must engage with this hopelessness in some way. The philosopher and cultural critic Philip Rieff — whose insights Christopher Anadale revisits in a brilliant recent essay, “Self-Knowledge After Rieff” — argued that we can characterize the first age of humanity’s intellectual history as metaphysically chaotic. Life might be nasty, brutish, and short, but the afterlife is nasty, brutish, and long. The concept of human life as having any sort of inherent value is tantamount to insanity. As Oedipus discovers, even the greatest human life can be crushed under the wheel of fortune, so you’d better appease the gods and pray that they don’t take too much notice of you. According to Rieff, Christianity irrevocably changes humanity’s idea of itself, introducing the bizarre concept that human beings are made in the image and likeness of a providential God who is love, the true, the good, and the beautiful. This weirdo God desires to be in a loving relationship with human beings so greatly that he would become entirely human, and die in an excruciatingly painful way, to restore the relationship human beings had lost with him through their own mistakes.
With the rationalism of early modernity and the Enlightenment, Europe’s leading intellectuals attempted to end this second, Christian age and return to the first, purified of any superstition. Existence is once again meaningless, devoid even of the teleology of the later classical thinkers like Aristotle. It now becomes the purview of human beings to create something out of nothing and impose meaning onto something that’s fundamentally meaningless. But, for Rieff, the cat is permanently out of the bag. No matter how much the philosophers may try, the idea that human life has value can’t be a fiat currency. It has to be based on something real and not arbitrarily self-determined by human beings; otherwise, the value of human life could drop to zero at any moment if the fiat were to be suddenly revoked. Returning to the first age would require the complete obliteration of any trace of Christianity’s seemingly unkillable cockroach of hope, which believes it is actually based on something abiding and rooted in love, rather than the quick reflexes of Pandora or the pettiness of her creator Zeus.
Is it possible, then, to do a faithful adaptation of a classical myth that retains the hopelessness of humanity’s first age while still maintaining the notion that human life has value from the second? In other words, can one really thread the needle, taking everything compelling from classical mythology while still holding that life’s hope and value rest on self-sacrificial love? A. Natasha Joukovsky’s new novel Medium Rare answers a slam-dunk yes. Seldom does one see such a master at work. Joukovsky weaves together, with greater success than Arachne, disparate intellectual threads into a single tapestry: a deep knowledge of what makes classical tragedy impossible to look away from and a facility with the novel as form, rooted in the choice plots of the genre’s best exemplars and an expansion of the anthropological insights of literary theorist René Girard.
Medium Rare adapts the plot of the Icarus myth (and to a lesser extent the story of Helios’ son, Phaëthon), cast through the lens of America’s annual hero’s journey, March Madness. A deeply mediocre Washington shale lobbyist, Phil Fayeton, through a combination of meager skill and maximal luck, beats the astronomical odds and creates a perfect bracket for the 2019 NCAA March Madness tournament. With each game Phil comes closer to achieving a legendary victory and receiving a prize pricier than the Golden Fleece — a tech mogul’s billion-dollar bounty for a perfect bracket. Along the way Phil, shock of shocks, flies too close to the sun, losing himself in the thin air of his own sudden fame, leaving his pregnant wife in the dust while he engages in an affair with sports commentator Sunny Sanders. Joukovsky is really, really good at making us hate this guy. If I saw Phil Fayeton flying overhead with his stupid Icarus wings and I had an anti-aircraft gun, you had better believe that there would only be a Looney Tunes-esque outline of feathers where Phil had once hovered unobliterated. And yet, you can’t help but love the fact that he just keeps winning.
Anyone even vaguely familiar with the Icarus myth knows from the get-go that Phil’s ascent can’t be but temporary, but Joukovsky very wisely provides several false moments where the reader thinks Phil’s luck has finally run out before he somehow blunders into flying even higher. Without giving too much away, Phil flies high in two worlds, sports and politics, as his fame in the first bafflingly propels him to success in the second. Joukovsky spins elements of Greek tragedy in a way that would have made Rieff’s third-age critics of teleology proud. Aristotle claims in the Poetics that the most compelling tragic figures are bastions of virtue and excellence who are better and nobler than the average viewer. For a character like this, enacting a grievous yet understandable mistake should be sufficient to stir up in one’s audience pity for the protagonist and fear of suffering a similar fate, according to Aristotle. Compared to Oedipus, Phil should have a dunce cap permanently welded to his stupid, dumb head, and yet there’s something really disturbing about the fact that Phil’s rise and fall get the same point across. One of the most notable architects of the attempted third age, Niccolò Machiavelli, opined in The Prince that fortune enabled the politically tactless Julius II to get one over on the brutal mastermind Cesare Borgia. Even though Machiavelli might explicitly state otherwise, careful readers of The Prince can’t help but walk away from the text feeling that it might be better to be fortunate rather than clever, lucky rather than wise, and Joukovsky deftly taps into this dream with Phil. This is what makes him such a compelling character, despite being human pond scum. There is something unsettling in the modern human heart that whispers to us, “What if I just kept winning? What if Ihad a legendarily good run of luck? Certainly I’d play it smart. I wouldn’t be a schmuck. I wouldn’t mess it up.” Even if we know that fortune’s love for us can’t last, some abiding curiosity, deep down in the nasty places of the soul, still asks, “How far could I go before I fell?”
This sort of thinking motivates the great antagonists of Jane Austen’s novels (and sometimes pays off for them — think Wickham at the end of Pride and Prejudice), but it’s not the sort of thinking that leads to a happy life. Joukovsky’s novel, at base, relies on the novel of manners as much as it does classical mythos. Phil is not the protagonist of Medium Rare; it’s Cassandra, a D.C. fundraiser who knew Phil and his then-girlfriend, now-wife Raleigh when they were at the University of Virginia together. Imbued with the gift of prophecy, not by Apollo but by her artistic insight as a novelist, which always walks the line between the mundane and the supernatural, Cassandra predicted that Phil and Raleigh would never work out. Like her namesake, her prophecy was ignored. Joukovsky, notable not only for her 2021 modern retelling of the Narcissus myth, The Portrait of a Mirror, but also for her popular Substack series “Austen Math,” nests what she calls a “choice plot” within the larger shell of updated myth.
At first, Cassandra seems to be a narrator like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, an observer caught in the splash zone of rich people wrecking their lives, but ultimately not the driving character of the story. (The parallels with Gatsby are explicit, as one of Phil’s new houses is called “an aerial West Egg.”) But even though Phil makes a string of terrible decisions, the central choice of the novel is Cassandra’s, not his. The reader will not be surprised to see Phil whiffing his moral shots over and over again, like a suburban dad having his worst day of putt-putt. Phil is doomed not by fate but by his smallness of soul. Cassandra, on the other hand, is caught between comfortable atomism and the peril of loving another person as she kindles a friendship with Raleigh that opens her up for the first time to unconditional love.
In a 2023 post on Substack, Joukovsky characterized the choice plot as one distinguished by “free will”: “In the choice plot, characters make things happen; in the no-choice plot, things happen to characters. . . . [T]he choice plot is distinguished not by absolute power, but by great power operating under frustrating constraints.” In Cassandra’s case, the choice centers around discretion and the problem of keeping silent, the very issue that animated Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Mansfield Park. Cassandra sees that Phil is adamant in pursuing his affair with Sunny, and yet Raleigh — whose philosophy of love is epitomized by kitschy living room decoration that declares Love means never having to say you’re sorry — would be shattered by this sort of revelation. For all her prophetic prowess, Cassandra is kind of a jerk. She sees herself as a “generational mind” and admits that, though she has a loving husband with whom she has a somewhat open relationship and twins of her own, she has never loved anyone as much as she has Raleigh and her newborn child, Virginia. She tells herself that “there are some illusions one can only break for oneself” as a justification for not telling Raleigh the truth, but she still sees in Raleigh something she’s never seen before: a simple and unaffected reflection of good.
Cassandra says she loves Raleigh for:
her remarkable, protean positivity . . . ours was nothing like the (rare) close female friendships I’d experienced previously, which had uniformly possessed a My Brilliant Friend-type intensity. I didn’t envy her. She didn’t envy me . . . Raleigh and I enjoyed each other’s company in its sheer, present pleasure, our reciprocal curiosity devoid of that primordial will to copy, the undercurrent that so often defines rapt, nonsexual proximity.
Cassandra’s insights are indebted to René Girard, the French anthropologist and literary critic whose influence is all over this novel. The choice plot turns around a central Girardian theme: true friendship is anti-mimetic, at least insofar as imitation leads to rivalry and violence. Though Raleigh is a side character, mediating between the Cassandra and Phil plotlines like a Jocasta or a Haemon, she does have a character arc, albeit one closer to Fanny Price’s than Emma Woodhouse’s: she begins the book as a good person and ends the book as a better person. Raleigh’s solid moral presence, when compared to Phil or Cassandra, presents an invitation rejected by the former and accepted by the latter: to love unselfishly.
Especially in Deceit, Desire and the Novel and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, Girard argues, parallel to Rieff, that the Judeo-Christian revelation inverts classical structures of scapegoating by revealing forgiveness as more proper to humanity than patterns of imitation and reciprocal violence. Joseph forgiving his brothers for selling him into slavery only makes sense through a commitment to a transcendent good that goes beyond human modes of valuation, which too often reduce interpersonal relationality to the purely transactional. In simpler terms, Raleigh loves Cassandra for her own sake because Raleigh’s love of a transcendent good enables her to see Cassandra as more than a tool. Raleigh is comfortable in her own being. Cassandra would be much more comfortable remaining in the world of transactional relationships, as she remarks that:
[I]t was, I thought more than once, extremely inconvenient that Raleigh and I didn’t want to sleep with each other. It might have happened naturally enough that week if either one of us had possessed the remotest inclination. But then, the extraordinary nature of our friendship would have, with sex, been rendered far less extraordinary, been tied implicitly to a quid pro quo that, as it stood, we were free from.
Raleigh’s goodness frees Cassandra to make a choice about the boundaries of their friendship, to decide for herself whether she thinks true friendship requires deception for a greater good. And she makes her choice.
Does Joukovsky’s adaptation of Greek myth maintain the classical world’s hopelessness? No. That is a good thing, because it points to the true sources of hopelessness and hope and achieves the same end as a good Greek tragedy: catharsis. Though Phil’s story doesn’t exactly evoke fear, it certainly evokes pity, and it raises the question of why we yearn to pursue fortune maximally, as he does. Phil is so easily hateable because we are all a little Phil. More important and compelling in Medium Rare is not the admittedly entertaining gimmick of blending myth and March Madness but the properly novelistic material underneath: the problem of how to be a good friend, and how to respond to love when it surprises us.
Authentic love, even in the most tragic circumstances, repels the miasma of hopelessness. Even Cicero thought that the best sorts of friends love each other more than themselves, but Joukovsky takes this one step further: true friendship doesn’t just affirm our being by relating it to transcendent good, it also makes us more free. It opens up choices to us, even as we become more responsible toward others. This is no world in which only those who die free of pain are happy. Rather, it is a world in which hope comes from being willing to lay down one’s life for those we love.
John-Paul Heil received his PhD from the University of Chicago. His essays have appeared in TIME, Smithsonian, The Week, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He is the books editor at Dappled Things.