Eugenides! (Reviewing The Marriage Plot and Middlesex)

After reading, and loving, Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot  a month or two ago, I decided to do something I rarely do, and jump right back to the same author immediately. That time, I read his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Middelsex.  But because I’ve been so insanely busy lately, I haven’t actually reviewed either one of them here. 

Lest you think they’re not worth your time, I figured I better talk about them once and for all. And since my thoughts on both have kind of become intertwined, I thought it would make sense to review them together. So here’s a quick two-fer.

First of all, the writing. It’s straightforward, and there’s nothing pretentious about his prose, but he still packs an amazing punch with his language choices. See this post for some gems from The Marriage Plot.  Or take a gander at this smattering from Middlesex :

“Dr. Philibosian smelled like an old couch, of hair oil and spilled soup, of unscheduled naps.”

“Cologne made me think of voice coaches, of maitre d’s, of old men and their unwanted embraces.”

“I was scandalized by the filth of men’s rooms, the rank smells and pig sounds, the grunting and huffing from the stalls. Urine was forever puddled on the floors. Straps of soiled toilet paper adhered to the commodes. When you entered a stall, more often than not, a plumbing emergency greeted you, a brown tide, a soup of dead frogs.”

I absolutely love his word choices, but there’s also something in the cadence and pacing of his writing that accentuates his more interesting phrases. His style is not flowery, and it doesn’t call attention to itself, but it still manages to elicit hearty guffaws and appreciative sighs as I speed through the stories.

Speaking of the stories, I won’t share plot points or spoilers here. I’ll simply say that I thought each was engrossing in its own way. The Marriage Plot  for its intellectual themes and college days search-for-self, and Middlesex  for its sprawling, multigenerational scope. Pitting one against the other, I’d call Middlesex  the better book, but if there’s one criticism I would level, it’s this: the unliklihood of a single family history encompassing the Greco-Turkish War, the infamous Great Fire of Smyrna, the founder and founding of the Nation of Islam, and the 1967 Detroit Riot. All of that backdrop, taken together in one book, smacks ever so slightly of Forrest Gump. But I loved it. Just like I loved The Marriage Plot.  The reason, in a word, is research.

I should state here that I probably spent more time poring over my family’s gilt-edged World Book Encyclopedias than any other set of books growing up. I am, still today, a Wikipedia fiend. So if you’re anything like me, you’ll love Eugenides. Reading one of his novels is a bit like taking a series of small correspondence courses. Pick up Middlesex  and you’ll learn about all the historical events I listed above, plus silk farming, the Greek-American immigrant experience, the business of bootlegging, and the intersex condition known as 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, which lies at the center of the story. Same goes for The Marriage Plot,  only there you’ll be introduced to semiotics and deconstruction in literature, manic depression, yeast genetics, Christian mysticism and so much more.

Not only does Eugenides provide fascinating insights into all of these things, but he carries it off with a masterful storytelling ability that keeps plot paramount, yet leaves no doubt as to the novels’ broader themes. Sadly, he is on the nine-year plan (releasing novels in 1993, 2002, and 2011), which means we may not get to see another one until 2020. Until then I’ll have to savor The Virgin Suicides-  or reread one of his others. They’re that good.

First Line Friday!

Today’s first line is one that absolutely grabs you by the ears and demands you pay attention. Have a look:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

Excuse me? You were what?  So begins Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel Middlesex.  

I love how the author delivers the crux of the plot in the very first line. He’s still going to take us through the twists and turns of a novel-length work, the slow burn of details, the crescendo of backstories and present action. But right there in the first line, he stabs his finger at the map and shows us our destination. It has the effect of making you wonder ‘how the devil are we going to get from here to there?’ And I, for one, was sold on the story.

Here’s how the next couple lines continue fleshing out the novel’s destination. I think it’s brilliant.

"Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce’s study, “Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites,” published in the Journal of Pediatric Endocrinology  in 1975. Or maybe you’ve seen my photograph in chapter sixteen of the now sadly outdated Genetics and Heredity.  That’s me on page 578, standing naked beside a height chart with a black box covering my eyes."

Agree? Disagree? Fire away!

From the Pen of Jeffrey Eugenides

There are few words to describe how bad that floral print shirt is in combination with the bus driver's vest, but what does Jeffrey Eugenides care? After all, there are even fewer words to describe how good his writing is in combination with the short, to-the-point introductions of characters, cities and sports below. 


I literally laughed out loud when I came across this first example, and had to rewind the audio book two or three times before I'd had my fill. All emphasis is mine:

"Phileda’s hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face." 

 

"Hygenically bald, with a seaman’s mustacheless white beard, Zipperstein favored French fisherman’s sweaters and wide wale corduroys."

"Saunders was a seventy nine year old New Englander. He had a long horsey face, and a moist laugh that exposed his gaudy dental work."

"The window gave onto a view of dove-gray roofs and balconies, each one containing the same cracked flowerpot and sleeping feline. It was as if the entire city of Paris had agreed to abide by a single understated taste. Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up the standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn’t clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully."

"There was something about tennis - its aristocratic rituals, the prim silence it enforced on its spectators, the pretentious insistence on saying “love” for zero and “deuce” for tied, the exclusivity of the court itself, where only two people were allowed to move freely, the palace-guard rigidity of the linesmen, and the slavish scurrying of the ball boys - that made it clearly a reproachable pastime."

First Line Friday

MacEvoy has been putting a bug in my ear as of late about The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.  I haven't read it, but I did take a look at the first page earlier today.  As such, I figured we might as well examine its first line:

"To start with, look at all the books."

Hmmmmm.  I don't love it, to be honest.  It's too flippant.  Too brief.  Too colloquial for my taste.  MacEvoy may disagree . . .

(Side Note:  I am considering discontinuing First Line Friday to pursue other opportunities, such as "Title Tuesdays" or "Metaphor Mondays." What say all of you?  Are we tired of First Line Fridays?)