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.
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