Oh, Eugenides!

Let's talk about the new Eugenides novel, The Marriage Plot.

I have to begin by confessing that I looooove uttering "the new Eugenides novel" when people ask me what I've been reading lately. It sounds and feels soooo pretentious coming off the tongue and since I make my living dissecting the potency and payoffs of punchlines, saying "the new Eugenides novel" out loud with assurance, diction and an impish wink somehow helps me justify the thousands my parents shelled out for my private education.

I read most of the novel over the course of one fabulously bright and chilly New York Saturday. It just so happened that the week previously, I had mentioned I was going to start the novel to a co-worker and she proffered that she knew Mr. Eugenides personally! "Jeffrey," she called him! How thrilling! Two glasses of vino later, she elaborated: they run in the same social circles and, "he's a total womanizer." I immediately started scanning my memory of his BRILLIANT, Pulitzer-winning Middlesex for hints and suggestions of such a scandalous accusation. Alas, my memory is like a Jackson Pollock painting: vivid, but splattered in a way that suggests eventual coherence only if thoroughly examined.

It was December, 2003. I was 23, playing a very butch lesbian, a homeless woman, a Nazi and a handful of other roles in a musical that landed in Detroit for Christmas. Not dating much due to the whole butch lesbian thing and the ensuing esteem-hit, I started a book club on the tour and Middlesex was our first selection. It was Kismet really as dreary, broken Detroit was the backdrop of the novel. I remember Detroit. I remember being stunned by the poetry and simplicity of Eugenides' prose. I remember the vividness of the character portraits. These are admittedly broad memory strokes, but in full disclosure, I have absolutely no memory of the books I read before or after that: Richard B. Wright's Clara Callan and Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees.

Yes, I have a list of every book I've read since college graduation and no, you can't see it. It would be less revealing to strip to my skivvies whilst being telecast on the jumbo-tron in Times Square.

This brings me to the beginning of the new Eugenides novel. The opening is sublime: an examination of our female protagonists' book collection. The thesis is clear and correct: we are what we read. We read to sojourn and luxuriate in others' lives and then identify the themes of our lives in accordance with those literary themes with which we commiserate. "Jeffrey's" details are exquisite. The first half of the novel, I intermittently wondered how Madeleine was so wonderfully three dimensional as written by a man/possible womanizer.

Plot quickie: we meet Madeleine, our modern-day Elizabeth Bennett on her graduation day from Brown University in 1982. She's a hung over English major with no job prospects. The plot jumps around the story of her relationships with her boyfriend Leonard, a troubled Mr. Wickham-esque science major and Mitchell, the novel's Mr. Darcy in the guise of an accidental religion major. He's fascinating and the descriptions of his backpacking around Europe made me want to try it.

The whole novel attempts to classify bookworms into either Austen-ites (Madeleine) or those who subscribe to semiotics (Leonard). Well, sort of. I'm pretty sure that Mr. Eugenides would be majorly offended by my oversimplification of his complex characters, especially since he clearly delights himself in the semiotic side of the philosophies behind the different means of literature construction, but almost everyone I know has seen both the Kiera Knightley and Jennifer Ehle Pride and Prejudice movies and will have to google the word semiotics. Luckily, my kindle has a built-in dictionary, so I didn't have to google it on the spot.

I'm being uncharitable, especially since I loved three quarters of the novel. He ends a little too easily for my taste. The last fifty pages felt pressed by a deadline, which is odd since he only publishes a novel a decade. I'm not judging. I only blog when I feel like it and Mr. Eugenides is a married professor of creative writing at Princeton University originally from Detroit who graduated from Brown. For one fabulously chilly day in New York city, "Jeffrey" helped me taste the Ivy League college experience I opted out of, choosing instead to attend an "acting" program in the Midwest.

Buy the hardback edition to display proudly in your personal collection? No. Download on the kindle? YES! Suggest the paperback for your book club? Absolutely. Not since Patty in Franzen's Freedom will a conversation by a group of women about this female protagonist incite talons to draw blood.

Up next: Isaacson's biography on Steve Jobs.

Hiding behind my Kindle

I spent the better part of this week's commute reading Geneen Roth's Women, Food and God, which is embarrassing to admit. Though not as embarrassing as the director of a theatrical piece I was work shopping recently proclaiming to the room that I should be going to Over Eaters Anonymous meetings instead of therapy, it's not a book you like to read on the subway. In all fairness and in the interest of full disclosure, said director identified (correctly) that I seem to be particularly bristle-y on Wednesdays post-therapy and OA meetings, her method of coping with the "food is love" paradigm cosmopolitan twenty-first century ladies-who-read-magazines-and-wear-hats are living in these days are cheaper! She's right about the cost of therapy, but made quite an assumption about my analysis. Still, I am decidedly inconspicuous about my love of pizza, cake and booze and yeah, I bought the much-hyped book six months ago while touring the country, playing a goat in a musical, swathed in a schmatta. There wasn't a huge impetus for me to choose salad at mealtimes. As the contract progressed, I found many of my evenings ending with the aforementioned pizza, cake and booze and I thought I might replace these things with some celery stalks and the wise words of Geneen Roth.

Unfortunately, I was so embarrassed by the dust jacket, I would store the book between the hotel box spring and mattress so that housekeepers across America wouldn't judge me whilst tidying my room and I'm pretty sure the book got left in Tulsa. Or Kalamazoo. As I sit here typing, I'm wondering why chucking the dust jacket never occurred to me. Hm. I think I just love the idea of hiding books under the mattress. Over the years, my mattress stash has included such provocative titles as What's Happening to my Body, Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation and Deenie. Deenie? Really? Judy Blume's heroine with scoliosis had to be hidden out of sight, but anything penned by VC Andrews and her smutty ghost-writers held a position of prominence on my childhood nightstand next to my crystal, neon phone (please see picture above). Cowabunga!

Enter a game-changer: the kindle. This week, I zipped through Women, Food and God at a pretty petty pace, thumbing the page forward button with vim and vigor. Here's the gist of it:

Part One - People have a complicated relationship with food (duh). Lots of people have the same problem you do, so you're not alone (double-duh). At this point, I'm rolling my eyes a lot and pissed I've given the woman $25 for both the hardback and kindle edition. She continues! You hate yourself. You're lonely. Your relationship to food = your relationship to everything in the world and in the spiritual realm. Uh-oh, she lost the atheist at the word God even though she said she would.

Part Two - Meditate, breathe and bring your focus to the here and now instead of leaving your body and drowning yourself in your complicated relationship with food. Why, thank you Geneen! I never thought of that! That's why I go to yoga, or rather contemplate going to yoga while watching the Biggest Loser on TV and eating ice cream. Plus, if I add half an hour of meditating to the list of the other things I'm supposed to be doing at the top of the day: Julia Cameron's morning pages, drinking a warm glass of water with lemon an hour before eating, twenty minutes of stretching, reading the NYT cover to cover, showering, brushing my teeth; I'll never get out the door.

Part Three - Eating guidelines: only eat when you are hungry and don't watch TV or read while you eat. This way, you can eat whatever you want as long as you are thinking about it while you are eating it. I read this chapter in the Tick-Tock diner on 34th St. I knew I should order a salad, but was lusting after a grilled cheese sandwich so I put Geneen's philosophy to the test and ordered it, pushing the boundaries with a side of sweet potato french fries. Upon delivery, I placed the kindle in my purse and ate my grilled cheese with bacon and tomato. When I finished, I realized that I was full and cursed Geneen Roth again. That bitch cost me another $5: the price of the sweet potato fries I couldn't eat due to mindful eating.

Preface

Every reader worth her salt knows the first sentence of anything printed (pixelated) on the page is of utmost importance: the gateway to the soul of the text. No pressure! In fact, by starting with that, I completely dodged it. I was thinking this while ambling through Central Park the other day, marveling at the various body types "running" the periphery of the reservoir. I thought that perhaps my foray into the world of writing should be a collection of dazzling opening statements/sentences. But really, who am I? And why would anyone purchase a novella (novelette? more of a list really...) by someone previously unpublished?

I'm an avid reader, especially in comparison with my nearest and dearest, and an abrupt change in living situation has, of late, given me more hours to lounge about on Central Park benches and masonry contemplating (judging) writing structure, the future of the printed page and our propensity these days to eschew modern grammar and boldly proclaim ANYTHING WE WANT, in all caps, ON THE INTERNET.

Sooo, because I've been looking for the perfect writing assignment that wouldn't subject those I love to examination and effacement ON THE INTERNET, I thought a marriage of reading and writing seemed predictably perfect; with my witty 'take,' of course!

I found it odd (embarrassing) that the same week I read three days of the New York Times cover to cover and finished Middlemarch, I happened to miss the death of Steve Jobs. Yeup. Missed it. I discovered this by walking past the Apple store on 67th and Broadway and wondering aloud, as I am apt to do, "What's with all the flowers, apples and post-it notes all up on the Mac store?" My walking companion was shocked, appalled and bemused (I'm hoping).

The moral of the story is: I missed it. By about five days. I must not be as well read as I thought. Hence, my exploration into what we read, how we read and why we read in this social media age by a 31-year-old first generation American of slightly-above-average intelligence m'Lady. Yeah, I typed it: m'Lady. I just finished Middlemarch (!) and the word 'woman' makes me sound old. 'Girl' is creepy at my age and 'lady' oddly makes it seem that I'm putting myself in the third, unfeminine person. Word choice is key, but we'll get to that another day.