There was no predicting where Jeffrey Eugenides would go after his first two novels, so different were they in tone and form. “The Virgin Suicides” — humid, dreamlike, entranced — comes off as a single thought. “Middlesex,” a chatty multigenerational saga that winds its way from Turkey to Michigan to San Francisco to Berlin, sweeping together the burning of Smyrna, the rise and fall of Detroit, the immigrant experience, the Nation of Islam, the sins of Nixon and, of course, the lore and genetics of intersexuality, has as many moving parts as a Rube Goldberg machine. “The Virgin Suicides,” edged with antic wit and edging toward the surreal, glances in Nabokovian contempt at the petty preoccupations of “rangers and realists.” “Middlesex,” for all the novelty of its hermaphroditic protagonist, is straight-up realism, start to finish.The books are far apart in quality, too. The language of “The Virgin Suicides” is taut and watchful from the first line, its mood a subtle synthesis of mystery and carnality. Like a myth, the novel imposes its own logic. In telling the story of five teenage sisters who kill themselves under the rapt gaze of the neighborhood boys, Eugenides showed a willingness to push to extremes, and the skill to bring it off once he got there. The book reminds me of Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping,” another flaying first novel, both of them imagistically obsessive, spiritually uncompromising stories of water, light, death and girls.
You almost can’t believe the same person is responsible for “Middlesex.” Clanking prose, clunky exposition, transparent devices, telegraphed moves — the novel is “Midnight’s Children” without the magic, the intellect or the grand historical occasion, a hash of narrative contrivances with very little on its mind. In making these judgments, of course — the novel was a huge best seller and a Pulitzer Prize winner, to boot — I am joining a minority of perhaps no more than one. But I found the whole thing utterly unpersuasive. Take away its trendy theme and dollops of ethnic schmaltz (it could have been called “My Big Fat Greek Novel”), and “Middlesex” scarcely contains a single real character or genuine emotion.
“The Marriage Plot” is yet a new departure — daylight realism, like “Middlesex,” but far more intimate in tone and scale. Instead of three generations, it presents us with three characters, college students leaving Brown in 1982, the year before Eugenides did: Madeleine Hanna, a beautiful, uncertain WASP; Leonard Bankhead, her sometime boyfriend, brilliant, brooding, charismatic, poor; and Mitchell Grammaticus, authorial surrogate, a Greek from Grosse Pointe, Mich., who yearns in alternation for Madeleine and God. The novel starts the day the three graduate, returns to college to give us the back story, then follows their first year out. Mitchell heads to Europe and India, seeking sanctity; the others keep house on Cape Cod, where Leonard works in a genetics lab and Madeleine applies to graduate school.
by William Deresiewicz, NY Times | Read more:
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