Ramona, Come Closer

Ramona Asubel's story in current New Yorker summer-reading issue, You Can Find Love Here, is nicely written but ultimately very slight - seems more in the vein of a Shouts and Murmurs entry than a fiction entry but so be it: she posits a dating website with prompt questions to help you fill out your profile - probably pretty close to the prompts that the various sites use, I'm guessing - and the person entering the profile info is the Cyclops of Homeric fame. OK it's a bit of a stunt and part of the long-standing tradition of the sensitive and sexy monster seeking human love - think of Rachel Ingalls's novel or more recently the thousands of vampire and zombie entries. At times it's pretty funny - he mentions that he teachers world literature, everything except the Odyssey, ha! - but all in all what's the point? One could try this for any # of literary or historical or mythical figures, I guess: What would Raskolnikov's profile look like? Hamlet's? Achilles'? But given the premier real estate - only 4 stories in this double issue of fiction - I would expect something with either more gravitas or with more LOL humor. Just saying.