Born in Detroit in 1960, Jeffrey Eugenides lived through the
city’s last glory years as the heart of the American auto industry.
His first two novels,
The Virgin Suicides (1993) and
Middlesex (2002), are rooted in Detroit and the adjacent
suburb of Grosse Pointe, where he spent much of his youth. These two
settings—the once-proud, dying city and its affluent suburb,
separate yet inextricably linked—are rendered as vividly as the
characters in these two books.
The Virgin Suicides takes
place in Grosse Pointe (“our waterlocked spit of land French
explorers had named the ‘Fat Tip’”). The story of five sisters
and their gruesome deaths is told in the collective voice of their
would-be suitors, now older but still haunted by the girls’
suicides.
Eugenides’s use of the first-person-plural voice in
The
Virgin Suicides was an audacious gambit; no less risky was his
choice of an intersex person to narrate
Middlesex. Raised a
girl, Callie Stephanides decides, after a tumultuous puberty and
several visits to a creepy specialist in Manhattan, to cross the
divide of gender and live as a man. To understand who he is—socially,
biologically, and genetically—the grown-up, male Cal not only
revisits his childhood memories of the sixties and seventies but also
reconstructs, as best he can (and at times fancifully), a family
history that moves from the early twentieth century in a Turkish
mountain village to Detroit during the boom years of the automotive
age.
Middlesex received the Pulitzer Prize. In 2007, Oprah
Winfrey chose it for her book club, making Eugenides a household
name. By that time, he was deep into
The Marriage Plot,a
novel thatlooks back at his college years at Brown in the eighties,
dramatizing the collision of radical French theory and the
orthodoxies of New Criticism. The story of three bright, restless
characters on the cusp of adulthood,
The Marriage Plot is in
some sense a novel of ideas, but ideas that matter only as they bear
on the messy business of living.
Our interview was conducted over two sessions last August in
Eugenides’s home in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lives with his
wife and daughter. As we reviewed the transcripts, Eugenides began an
extended book tour of the United States, Canada, and Europe.
Questions were revisited by phone, and many answers were clarified,
or rewritten, by hand on hotel stationery—evidently during moments
of turbulence—as Eugenides flew between Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Portland, Seattle, Chicago, and Toronto.
INTERVIEWER
This is a beautiful room. Do you write here?
EUGENIDES
This is my summer office. It’s mostly glass and looks onto the
garden. I thought it would be my dream studio, but actually the glass
is distracting, so I end up using a dismal bedroom upstairs. Leonardo
said that small rooms concentrate the mind. I find that I like
working in small, cramped rooms with not much in them, as compared to
a pretty studio. But I feel guilty about not using this room, so I
come down here in the summer and try to do something useful. Thank
you for giving me the opportunity to use my nice studio. Actual
composition I don’t want to do in a pleasant space. I’m even
thinking of moving up into the attic because it’s the most austere
and removed place in the house.
INTERVIEWER
In the other places you’ve lived, have you done your work in
similarly small rooms?
EUGENIDES
In college and in the apartments I lived in after college, I had
just one room that was mine—my bedroom. So I’m used to working at
a desk that’s not that far from the bed. I worked in the living
room for part of
Middlesex. Finally, when we moved to
Berlin, we got a bigger apartment, and I worked in one of the extra
bedrooms. Mainly I’ve written my books in bedrooms of apartments.
This is the first house we’ve ever owned, so now I have an actual
studio. I was almost fifty by the time I had one.
INTERVIEWER
Do you keep to a strict writing schedule?
EUGENIDES
I do. I try to write every day. I start around ten in the morning
and write until dinnertime, most days. Sometimes it’s not
productive, and there’s a lot of downtime. Sometimes I fall asleep
in my chair, but I feel that if I’m in the room all day,
something’s going to get done. I treat it like a desk job.
With
The Marriage Plot, the last year or so, I started
doing double sessions where I would work all day, have dinner, and
then go back and work at night. I didn’t want to put myself through
that, but I had so much to do and a lot of things were coming
together, so I had to work long hours. I’d go to bed at midnight
and wake up at seven or eight and start again.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have any special rituals, or is writing something you just
have to hunker down and do?
EUGENIDES
Nothing out of the ordinary. The usual stimulants—coffee or tea.
And at the end of a book, when I’m extremely exhausted, mentally
fatigued, I sometimes sneak off into the yard and smoke a cigar,
maybe six or seven times per book. That’s a bad habit I picked up
when I lived in Berlin.
INTERVIEWER
Cal in
Middlesex smokes cigars.
EUGENIDES
That’s why that got in there. Occasionally, instead of having a
Red Bull, as a twenty-year-old might, I resort to the Thomas Mann
method, the Maria Mancinis, but not very often. Cigars are the
perfect literary drug. I understand why Mann, Freud, and so many
durable people smoked cigars. It really focuses the mind. But I
didn’t do it much with
The Marriage Plot. I was in
healthy, nonsmoking America and stayed mainly clean.
INTERVIEWER
Do you always write on the computer?
EUGENIDES
I compose on the computer. Now and then, I print out what I’m
working on and make handwritten corrections. There’s usually a
period where I make corrections by hand, turn the page over, and
write new paragraphs on the back of the sheet. I used to do that
almost every day. It seems I do that less and less often. Now I can
go as long as a month before printing something out. But there are
always handwritten corrections at some point.
INTERVIEWER
Do you rewrite your sentences over and over again or do they come
out fairly finished in a first draft?
EUGENIDES
The Virgin Suicides was written in a slow, methodical
fashion, sentence by sentence. Parts of my other books were written
that way as well. There were small transitions in
Middlesex,
even though they were only three or four sentences long, where I had
to spend a long time to get them to move. There are so many time
shifts in the book, and it was difficult to give the right signposts
so that the reader knew what was happening. I rewrite a lot. That’s
why I don’t publish books very often. The fact that I’m working
every day and publish so seldom shows that I’m reworking and
rewriting a lot on the sentence level, and on the paragraph and
structural levels, too.
INTERVIEWER
Do you outline your novels?
EUGENIDES
I don’t start with an idea and outline it. I don’t see how you
can know what’s going to happen in a book or what the book is about
beforehand. So I plunge in headlong, and after a while I get worried
that I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going, so I begin
to make a fuzzy outline, thinking about what might happen in the book
or how I might structure it. And then that outline keeps getting
revised. I’ll have it there, like a security blanket, to make me
feel better about what I’m doing, but it’s provisional. Always
you discover things and have ideas of how it might work out as you’re
writing, and often the surprise of coming to these conclusions is
what makes the book’s plot points surprising to the reader, too. If
you can see on your first day what’s going to happen, the reader
can likely guess as well. It’s the more complex ideas, the more
difficult-to-foresee consequences of your story, that are more
interesting to write about, and to read about as well.
INTERVIEWER
What about metaphoric patterning? Silk, for example, is so
important throughout
Middlesex. How extensively do you plan
for those sorts of recurring motifs?
EUGENIDES
You just delve into certain subjects, and the patterns start to
crop up. With
Middlesex, the narrator’s grandparents were
silk farmers. I was interested in writing about that and the town in
Asia Minor they came from. Then, as I started reading about silk, I
came upon the legend of the Chinese princess said to have discovered
it. This is a beautiful story, and it immediately seemed to have a
connection with the story I was writing. So when you’re working on
something, especially something as long as
Middlesex—I
think Joyce said this—everything out in the world seems to refer to
your story. You constantly find things that metaphorically align with
what you’re working on. Slowly, as you write the book, you become
aware of these correspondences, and then you make them cohere into a
pattern. So in the case of
Middlesex, the thread of silk
becomes a metaphor not only for genetic transmission but for
storytelling itself.
INTERVIEWER
Silk enables a highly unlikely confluence of the character
Desdemona and the Nation of Islam in Detroit. Was this something
you’d planned to write about from the beginning?
EUGENIDES
That was serendipity. I was already long engaged with my story of
Greek immigrants, former silk farmers, newly arrived to the Detroit
of the thirties, when I came across an article by Darryl Pinckney in
The New York Review of Books about the Nation of Islam. The
founder was a man named W. D. Fard. He was reportedly from the “near
East.” He was a silk merchant. He propagated theories full of
racial antagonism and genetic engineering—and there he was, right
in Detroit in 1932. He begged to become part of the novel, and soon
he was.
INTERVIEWER
At what point do you feel comfortable giving drafts to other
people to read?
EUGENIDES
Extremely late. Years and years go by without anyone seeing
anything. I want my mistakes to become obvious to me before anyone
else has to suffer reading them, so I never feel the need to show
anything for a long time. Finally I do, but, for instance,
The
Marriage Plot was entirely written before my editor, Jonathan
Galassi, read a word of it, except for the excerpt that was in
The
New Yorker. But I don’t know if it’s the most effective way
to work. I think I’m so scared the book is going to be bad that I
don’t want anyone to see it until I’ve fixed everything that can
be fixed. And you can keep fixing things ad infinitum.
INTERVIEWER
How much revising do you do in proofs?
EUGENIDES
Usually I’m turning the book in at the last minute. I always say
it’s like the Greek Olympics—“Hope the torch lights.”
With
The Marriage Plot, I handed in the manuscript in
December 2010. At that point, the penultimate chapter was unfinished
and the last chapter unwritten. I expected that Jonathan would want
to publish in the spring of 2012, but, after reading the book, he
told me that it was almost there and that he wanted to publish in the
fall of 2011, nine or ten months away. For the next four months—from
Christmas until just after Easter, I worked like a madman, finishing
the last two chapters and revising the entire
four-hundred-and-fifty-page manuscript. I turned in the final draft
in May, at the time when most fall books would already have been
copyedited and printed in galley form. But those four months were
enough—Jonathan was right. The thing was done.
INTERVIEWER
Were the changes prompted by Jonathan Galassi, or were they
largely your own?
EUGENIDES
I had four readers for the book, Jonathan, my wife, Karen, Lorin
Stein, and my German publisher, Alexander Fest. I responded to all of
their queries and suggestions. And I worked on passages and sections
I wasn’t happy with myself. My wife, who’s a very good reader,
and whose help was immeasurable, got a tad overzealous. Her notes ran
to a hundred and fifty pages. Finally, I told her that her notes were
going to be longer than my book and that she should publish them as a
novel of her own!
When the first page proofs came back, I bore down on the book once
again, this time listening only to my inner promptings. I inserted
new transitions and polished everything I could. I kept going deep
into the summer, staying alone for a month in Berlin. When the final
proofs were sent to me, there was little left to do. It was July by
then—three months until it was to be published—but the book was
done. I sprinted the last mile and held out the sacred flame, in the
form of a red pencil.
INTERVIEWER
When did you decide to be a writer?
EUGENIDES
I decided very early—my junior year of high school. We read
A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that year, and it had a
big effect on me, for reasons that seem quite amusing to me now. I’m
half Irish and half Greek—my mother’s family were Kentuckians,
Southern hillbillies, and my paternal grandparents immigrants from
Asia Minor—and, for that reason, I identified with Stephen Dedalus.
Like me, he was bookish, good at academics, and possessed an “absurd
name, an ancient Greek.” Joyce writes somewhere that Dedalus sees
his name as an omen of his destiny, and I, at the dreamy age of
sixteen, did as well.
Eugenides was in
The Waste Land.
My Latin teacher pointed that out to me. The only reason I was given
to these fantasies in the first place, of course, was that the power
of Joyce’s language and the story of Stephen Dedalus refusing to
become a priest in order to take up the mantle of art were so
compelling to me. Dedalus wants to form the “uncreated conscience
of his race.” That’s what I wanted to do, even though I didn’t
really know what it meant. I do remember thinking, however, that to
be a writer was the best thing a person could be. It seemed to
promise maximum alertness to life. It seemed holy to me, and almost
religious.
I went about it very methodically. I chose Brown largely in order
to study with John Hawkes, whose work I admired. I entered the honors
program in English, which forced me to study the entire English
tradition, beginning with
Beowulf. I felt that since I was
going to try to add to the tradition, I had better know something
about it.
INTERVIEWER
When you were younger what sort of reading did you do?
EUGENIDES
In the house I grew up in, there was a large, built-in bookcase in
the living room. My parents, who had grown up in modest
circumstances—my mother quite poor—aspired to a higher condition,
culturally and financially. And so they were the perfect marks for
encyclopedia salesmen. In those days, salesmen came to your door and
rang the bell, and my parents invited many of them in. With three
boys to educate, my parents invested in various sorts of books: the
Great Books series, the
World Book Encyclopedia, the Modern
Library editions, et cetera. My mother was, and is, a big reader of
novels, so there were lots of contemporary books as well. The big
bookshelf exerted a power over me as a kid, not unlike the
fascination the family bookshelves have for Madeleine in
The
Marriage Plot.Sometimes in high school, as I grew to be aware of
literature, I found we had many canonical works on our shelves—often
unread. I found
Ulysses that way and
An American Tragedy
and, way up on the top shelf,
Everything You Always Wanted to
Know About Sex. At the same time, I was being forced to read
Henry James at school. I hated it. With the result that James became
one of my favorite writers.
I arrived at college not knowing much, however. It wasn’t until
my twenties that I became a serious reader. Between the ages of
twenty and thirty, I read with a voraciousness unmatched in any other
decade of my life. I was trying to become less stupid.
INTERVIEWER
Do you remember your first efforts at fiction?
EUGENIDES
In elementary school, our teachers used to give us the first half
of a story and then tell us to finish it. I loved doing that. It
excited me like nothing else. Later, in junior high and high school,
I began writing short stories and submitting them to the lit
magazines and the school literary contest.
INTERVIEWER
Who were some of the writers important to you later on?
EUGENIDES
In college, the writers I was most interested in were the great
modernists. Joyce, Proust, Faulkner. From these I went on to discover
Musil, Woolf, and others, and soon my friends and I were reading
Pynchon and John Barth. My generation grew up backward. We were
weaned on experimental writing before ever reading much of the
nineteenth-century literature the modernists and postmodernists were
reacting against. It was like studying art history by starting with
Cubism before going to look at the Italian Renaissance. In my early
twenties, I read Tolstoy for the first time and discovered what I’d
been missing.
I liked the muscular cerebration in Joyce, the high-priestly
manner, the puns, the play of language. I liked the specificity of
his Dublin portraits and the self-reflective nature of modernist
texts themselves. But I liked the clarity of Tolstoy even more, and
the vividness, the lifelikeness of his characters. His method didn’t
seem worn-out to me. It was still conveying meaning to me, directly
from Yasnaya Polyana to my third-floor apartment. My entire career so
far has been an attempt to reconcile these two poles of literature,
the experimentalism of the modernists and the narrative drive and
centrality of character of the nineteenth-century realists.
INTERVIEWER
You mentioned John Hawkes. How did he affect your development?
EUGENIDES
Hawkes taught me how to write sentences and how to think
fictively. He disciplined my prose, pointing out where it was fuzzy
or overwritten or where the tone or voice slipped. And in his
enthusiasm for portions of my work and the work of others in the
class, he taught us to recognize what was good about it—good, for
Jack, being the presence of arresting, deeply psychological, often
sexual or sensual moments. Sometimes he misread our stuff, seeing
things in it that weren’t there. But in doing so he often provided
a lesson in how to think about art. We watched him doing it right in
front of us. Much of what you learn from a writing instructor happens
by osmosis.
INTERVIEWER
Was there anyone else important to you at that time, including
your contemporaries?
EUGENIDES
Rick Moody and I were in a number of workshops with Hawkes. It was
great to have a friend who was as serious as I was about writing.
There were also two women, Carrie Twichell and Melora Wolff, who were
serious writers, and we were kind of a foursome, reading one
another’s work and bathing in Hawkes’s attention and approval.
INTERVIEWER
Were you ever interested in poetry?
EUGENIDES
I started out as a poet. I wrote poetry in high school and in
college both. The first prize money I ever received from writing came
from winning second place in a college poetry contest. My submission
was an imagist poem, strongly influenced by Pound, called “Fox
Point.” I got seventy-five bucks and was thrilled.
It was narrative that came between me and poetry. My favorite
poems, in a sense, were ancient epics, the
Iliad,
Odyssey,
and
Aeneid. I wanted poetic language to be in service
of narrative, and that seemed to me to be
the province of the
novel now—a lyrical novel, maybe, like my first,
The Virgin
Suicides.
INTERVIEWER
The Virgin Suicides is so vivid and dreamlike that it
comes across as a sort of prose poem. Were you very conscious of the
Updike-Cheever tradition of suburban fiction while writing it?
EUGENIDES
Not really. I
was aware that you weren’t supposed to
write about suburbia, that it was undignified in some way, the
subject matter not momentous enough. And so, for a long time, that
kept me from writing about it. But once I began, I realized it was
just as interesting as anywhere else. I’d been writing for years
before I wrote
The Virgin Suicides.But
The Virgin
Suicides was, oddly, one of the first things I set in my
hometown, even though I didn’t name it.
Like a lot of young writers, when I started out, I had a dim
conception of my material. I wrote about people and places that were
vastly separated from those I knew. Then, too, if I tried to write
about my own self, the results were far from illuminating, for the
simple reason that I didn’t understand myself too well. As soon as
I began writing
The Virgin Suicides, however, I suddenly
realized that I knew a lot, not about my own psychological dimensions
so much but about the town where I grew up. I knew everything about
the people who lived on our old street. I remembered their oddities
and family histories, the rumors and gossip, and I remembered the
weather, the local legends, the racial tensions, the flora and fauna.
I stopped being embarrassed about being from a suburb in the Midwest.
I treated it like my own Yoknapatawpha County and, for the first
time, produced something that interested adult readers.
INTERVIEWER
Suburbia is designed to be a safe, uneventful place, and yet, of
course, some basic human impulses, and especially the unruly energy
of adolescence, work against that.
The Virgin Suicides takes
shape around this tension. The setting occasions a particular sort of
longing and, inevitably, its disappointment.
EUGENIDES
The Virgin Suicides is about the city, too. It’s about
Detroit in an indirect but crucial way. It was years after writing
the book that I came to understand this. When I was born, Detroit was
the fourth-largest city in the country. The population stood at more
than a million people. But people were already beginning to flee, and
in 1967, when the riots occurred, the trickle turned into a flood. My
entire childhood coincided with the demise of Detroit. I grew up
watching houses and buildings fall apart and then disappear. It
imbued my sense of the world with a strong elegiac quality—a direct
experience of the fragility and evanescence of the material world.
That was what I was really writing about. I had imagined
a family of suicidal sisters, five brief lives, and I’d put them in
an atmosphere of ruin and decay—the dying automobile plants, the
dying elm trees—but the source of all this, psychologically and
emotionally, had to do with the impermanence of everything I knew as
a child.
INTERVIEWER
Did you always plan on telling
The Virgin Suicides in the
first-person plural?
EUGENIDES
Yes, I started it with the “we” voice. In an early draft of
the first chapter, I had one of the boys speak for the others. Donald
Antrim read it and gave me a very useful suggestion. He said, “Why
do you have this one
I after all these
we’s? You
don’t really need to.” And he was right. The whole thing was
we
except for one or two instances. I had the
we voice, but I
wasn’t trusting it completely. And Don gave me the confidence to do
so.
INTERVIEWER
If you were pedantically minded you could try to find out which of
the boys is narrating, but you’d fail. It makes
The Virgin
Suicides the most obviously “experimental” of your three
novels.
EUGENIDES
In James Wood’s
How Fiction Works, he writes, “The
house of fiction has many windows, but only two or three doors. I can
tell a story in the third person or in the first person, and perhaps
in the second person singular, or in the first person plural, though
successful examples of these latter two are rare indeed.” They
are
rare, and on that basis alone,
The Virgin Suicides qualifies
as experimental. The first-person plural was very rare when I used it
back in 1993. I only knew of two examples—Faulkner’s “A Rose
for Emily” and Gabriel García Márquez’s
The Autumn of the
Patriarch. Lately, a lot of writers have been using it,
often, as I did, in novels about childhood and adolescence.
A narrative voice allows you to say things you couldn’t
otherwise. It frees you from the prison of the ego and the
limitations of habitual thinking. One of the great mysteries of
writing fiction, and one of the greatest pleasures, is the discovery
of a voice that opens up a channel to impersonal, but specific,
knowledge.
INTERVIEWER
The idea of an intersex narrator seems completely novel. Were
there any precedents you looked to with
Middlesex?
EUGENIDES
In the eighties, I read Michel Foucault’s
Herculine Barbin:
Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French
Hermaphrodite. The story intrigued me—I wanted to know what it
was like to be Herculine. Unfortunately, she was unable to describe
her own life in the detail I desired. The memoir is evasive about
Herculine’s anatomy. The style is melodramatic. Herculine was a
convent-school girl, and she writes with the reticence about sex and
the lack of psychological insight you might expect. The memoir
frustrated me. I wanted it to be a different document from the one it
was. And so I decided to write that document myself.
The precedents were obvious—the ancient myths, Ovid’s
Metamorphoses especially, and Woolf’s
Orlando.
Unlike those examples, I didn’t want to write a story about a
fanciful figure who magically changes sex. I wanted to write about a
real person to whom this happened, and I wanted to be as accurate as
I could about the biological facts. To that end, I began to do
research at the Columbia medical library, reading about the various
so-called pseudo-hermaphroditic conditions. The one I chose to give
my narrator—5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome—suited my
purposes dramatically. People born with the condition appear female
at birth and then virilize significantly at puberty. The salient fact
of this condition, however, is that it results from a recessive
genetic mutation. As soon as I learned that, the book became a
different thing altogether. Instead of a short fictional memoir on
the level of a Herculine Barbin, the book would be the story of a
mutated gene that is passed down through three generations of a
single family, until two copies of the gene end up in the body of my
narrator and bring about his unusual, but very plausible and real,
life.
INTERVIEWER
There’s a line in the novel that says to know Cal you have to
know what came before.
EUGENIDES
The genetics led me back a few generations and, inevitably, into
history. Because 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome only occurs
among inbred, isolated populations, I got the idea to begin the book
among Greeks living in a small village in Asia Minor.
INTERVIEWER
Did it turn out even longer than you expected?
EUGENIDES
At that point, I knew it would be a comic epic. It took me a long
time to get the right voice for the novel, but I knew I had a big
book on my hands.
One last point—people often ask me why I chose to narrate a
novel from the point of view of an intersex person, and my answer is,
every novel should be narrated by an intersex person. The job of the
novelist is to inhabit both male and female characters, so in a sense
every novelist should possess a hermaphroditic imagination.
INTERVIEWER
What do you feel is the difference between male and female points
of view?
EUGENIDES
I don’t think in terms of a male or female point of view. I
think in terms of individual people. I never write about “women.”
I write about one woman, or one man, or one intersex person. Fiction
should be specific rather than general, because people are specific.
INTERVIEWER
Do you have a view on whether men and women write differently?
EUGENIDES
The stereotypes are that men write in a linear, forward-driven,
logical fashion, and women write in a more circuitous, intuitive one.
Well, that first description fits Flannery O’Connor, and the second
description fits Proust. So I don’t think the distinction is
terribly useful.
INTERVIEWER
Kate Christensen talks about unleashing her “inner dick” to
write one of her novels, disputing the notion that there’s some
kind of essentialist way of writing for either gender.
EUGENIDES
Again, with
Middlesex I tried to be as specific as
possible. I analyzed Cal as a doctor would. Cal has XY chromosomes.
He was exposed to normal male levels of testosterone in utero,
neonatally, and at puberty. If these things affect brain chemistry,
and if that in turn results in a linguistic patterning that is
identifiably male or female—and again, the jury is out on that—then
Cal would write in a so-called male way, whatever that means. All I
needed to do was to devise a voice that was Cal’s particular voice.
I didn’t have to sound feminine or hermaphroditic, which was good,
because I’m skeptical of those categorizations anyway.
INTERVIEWER
Did you get any responses from intersex people?
EUGENIDES
When the book first came out, I was in Portland, Oregon, doing a
reading, and I got picketed by a splinter group of the Intersex
Society of North America. They were upset that I had used the word
hermaphrodite, which they consider pejorative. After my
reading, I had a discussion with them and we came to an agreement.
I agreed never to refer to actual, living people as
hermaphrodites. I promised to promote this distinction as much and
often as I was able. However, I reserved the right to use
hermaphrodite when speaking about mythical and literary
figures, such as Tiresias. The term
hermaphrodite has a long
history, and it would be wrong to make it entirely off-limits. The
demonstrators thought this was reasonable and none of my readings has
been picketed since.
After the book had gained more notoriety, I began receiving
letters from intersex people—all of them positive. Then, when I was
on
Oprah, the show was mainly devoted to the issue.
Just last week, a person came up to me at a reading and whispered
in my ear that he has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. He was
the first person I’ve ever met with the condition, on account of
its rarity. He gave me a letter, thanking me for writing
Middlesex.
He said that the book had saved his life in high school. He also said
that, in addition to being grateful to me, he is sometimes angry
because he feels that I wrote the book he should have written
himself.
INTERVIEWER
The first half of
Middlesex is basically a historical
novel. Was that difficult to write?
EUGENIDES
It was difficult because I don’t tend to like historical novels.
To claim to be able to understand and re-create a lost time, perhaps
a century before your birth, is, at a minimum, hubristic. And then
there is the narrative tone of so many historical novels. They try to
sound period, with the result that the prose becomes wooden. They
become inflected by the bygone days they seek to chronicle. And so I
had to avoid those pitfalls with
Middlesex, and how I did it
was to make no claim of total omniscience. Cal tells the story of his
grandparents as truthfully as he can, but it’s clear he’s making
things up, embellishing his tale. There are many asides to the reader
where Cal admits as much. I felt that this admission was an honest
way to treat the reader. I also felt that the tone of the book
accorded with Cal’s character. His need to understand how he came
to be the way he is drives him to tell this historical tale,
sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third, literally
breaking out of the confines of his ego. Cal’s narrative method is
a response to his genetic condition. The history is all personal,
even when he’s narrating events before his birth.
INTERVIEWER
Did you go to Izmir, the city that used to be Smyrna?
EUGENIDES
I was there in 1985 without realizing the significance. At that
time, I knew little about my grandparents’ history in Turkey. Only
when I decided to write about a Greek village near Bursa did I begin
to learn about it. It was years after writing
Middlesex that
I finally visited the village where my grandparents came from.
INTERVIEWER
The burning of Smyrna and the Detroit riot echo each other in the
book.
EUGENIDES
The book is full of echoes, of repetitions, as any novel about
genetics is likely to be. The burning of Smyrna brings up the other
difficulty I had in writing the historical sections of
Middlesex,
the difficulty being that I didn’t know anything. I was at Yaddo
when I was writing about Smyrna, and the book wasn’t proceeding at
all. I was trying to body forth the city and the fire completely from
my imagination. One day, I despaired. I was about to give up on the
whole novel when I discovered a book on a table in the mansion. The
book was by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, and it was called
Smyrna
1922. That book taught me everything I needed to know about the
burning of Smyrna, and it taught me to start doing more serious
research. Imagination wasn’t enough.
INTERVIEWER
One of the things I admire about
Middlesex is the way you
manage the incest between Lefty and Desdemona. Because it’s such a
fundamental human taboo, the incest risks overtaking the rest of the
narrative.
EUGENIDES
Not everyone thinks I managed it. I’ve heard that some people
slam the book shut at that point. Incest was necessary for the story,
however. I needed to dramatize inbreeding. Inbreeding is slow and
invisible and takes place over centuries. I had to make it happen
quickly, so I have a brother and sister who fall in love.
Zeus and Hera were brother and sister, too, of course.
Middlesex
begins as a kind of fairy tale. The idea was to have the book
recapitulate the DNA of the Novel. Therefore, it begins with epic
events and becomes, in its second half, more modern, psychological,
and realist. The incest happens in the mythic, fabulist portions of
the novel. It doesn’t possess the realism that might make it
offensive. So, yes, you’re right. I was trying to manage this
scandalous material, to handle it lightly.
INTERVIEWER
When Calliope goes to private school she is something of an
outcast, not because of her condition but because of class, and
similarly in
The Marriage Plot you have Mitchell, when he
comes to stay with Madeleine’s family, being exposed to a different
world, one presided over by the college-president father and his
formidable wife. It seems like you’re interested in writing about
the upper class from the perspective of people who are connected to
it but not of it.
EUGENIDES
My mother was born into a rural Kentucky family who were
thoroughly Southern in their speech and manners. During the
Depression, like so many poor Southerners, they loaded up their truck
with every possession they had and lit out for Detroit, hoping to
find work in the factories. In Detroit, my mother’s father
abandoned the family, so she was raised by my grandmother, who
supported herself as a waitress and, later, as a worker at the
Packard plant. My father was the son of Greek immigrants. My
grandfather ran a bar and grill on Detroit’s east side. As a young
man, my father considered taking over the bar and, later, he pursued
a career in the military, but he finally ended up in the mortgage
business. He did well, and by the time I came along, the youngest of
three sons, our family had moved into the upper middle class, at
least financially.
I mention all this to give you a sense of where I was coming from
when, in seventh grade, I was sent to private school. There, for the
first time, I came in contact with kids from monied families—this
was Grosse Pointe, after all. These kids gave off a strong sense of
entitlement. Around them, I became conscious that I was one
generation removed from hillbillies. We didn’t have the same kind
of furniture in our house as those rich kids had. We didn’t have
the same traditions, didn’t summer in Vinalhaven, or have boozy
cocktail parties.
For some reason, I felt that they were doing it the right way and
we were doing it wrong. I became self-conscious about my curly hair
and aquiline nose. As a Greek, I was considered “ethnic,” a word
I loathe—who isn’t ethnic, when you come down to it? I was
fourteen years old, and I had become aware of class.
The rich kids at my school, the Waspy kids, tended to do poorly as
students. That was part of their entitlement. The “ethnic” kids
did well. So I developed both a superiority and an inferiority
complex vis-à-vis the rich kids. We looked funny and didn’t know
how to dress, but we were smarter. As school went on, I became close
with many of the gentry, and these divisions faded, as they have
generally in the United States. But this experience shaped my
thinking about the world, no question.
Ian McEwan just wrote me about the new book and said, “People
say there’s not a class system in America. Now I know there is, and
I can tell them what to read if they don’t know.” I didn’t know
The Marriage Plot was that much about the class system, but
I guess it is.
INTERVIEWER
The snooty clique of rich girls at Baker and Inglis, the Charm
Bracelets, are depicted satirically. Have you ever thought about
writing a full-blown satire?
EUGENIDES
Middlesex is as close as I get to satire. Parts of it are
broadly comic. But I’m a realist at heart, even in my most fanciful
moments.
The Marriage Plot is my most realistic book yet,
and more serious emotionally than a satiric treatment would allow.
I’ve tried to write pure comic satire, but I haven’t found the
right subject for the satire to be not only biting but bracing.
INTERVIEWER
There are incomplete novels you’ve set aside?
EUGENIDES
I have four or five novels, each about 120 pages in length. One is
a satiric novel very much like the one you’re wondering if I would
ever write.
INTERVIEWER
Didn’t
The Marriage Plot come out of one of those
unfinished novels?
EUGENIDES
Yes. Appropriately for a novel titled
The Marriage Plot,
the book began as an instance of literary adultery. In the late
nineties, while I was writing
Middlesex, I hit a rough patch
and put the manuscript aside. I hadn’t fallen out of love with
the book, but I wasn’t sure where the relationship was headed.
Predictably, I started flirting with another book, about a rich
family throwing a debutante party. I thought this new book would be
less demanding and easier to be with, but after a month or so I
realized that I was dreaming. I missed
Middlesex, too.
I thought I knew why we hadn’t been getting along and so I returned
to it, chastened but fervent. After
Middlesex came out, I
went back to the debutante book and worked on it for another
couple years. It was all right, but I had qualms about. It felt
vaguely antique. Then one day I wrote a sentence that changed
everything. It’s on page nineteen of
The Marriage Plot
now, and it goes like this, “Madeleine’s love troubles had
begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed
the very notion of love.” This didn’t feel antique. It felt
fresh, connected with personal memories of college. I became so
interested in Madeleine and the two male figures who orbit around her
that I kept writing about them all, greatly extending that section
of the book. One dark winter day in Chicago, I came to the
conclusion that I had two novels on my hands. Over the course of the
next weeks, I surgically separated them, leaving the debutante party
behind, and followed Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard on an entirely
different journey. I didn’t know, at that point, that the book
would have anything to do with the marriage plot or that the marriage
plot would provide me with a structure for the novel.
INTERVIEWER
How did you respond in college to the literary theory that
Madeleine reads?
EUGENIDES
When I arrived at Brown, French theory was just washing up on
American shores. Many of my English professors were distrustful of
it. Another cohort in the English department was so smitten with
Derrida and company that they finally decamped and created the
Program in Semiotic Studies. To be an English major at the time was
like being the child of divorcing parents. You loved both. I was
attracted to the rigor of semiotic literary theory, especially in
comparison with some of the vague pedagogy that constituted the
by-then old New Criticism. I was persuaded that it was possible to
examine the underlying structures of literature and, in a sense,
anatomize the body of literature. At the same time, I wanted to be a
writer. I resisted the idea that the author was dead. And I still
believed, as I believe today, that it’s possible for a novel to
transmit meaning, something that was being called into question by
deconstruction.
INTERVIEWER
In a recent interview, Philip Roth said that after finishing a
long book, a writer stages a rebellion against that previous book in
the next project. Did you feel a desire after
Middlesex to
do something quite different?
EUGENIDES
When you finish a book—long or short—you do feel rebellious.
You’re tired of working in one mode, and you want to do something
different.
Middlesex is quite different from
The Virgin
Suicides.
The Marriage Plot is quite different from
both of those. Maybe I’ll settle into a period where I can do a
number of books, like Roth’s American Trilogy, where I’m working
in a certain manner, but at the end of that I’m sure I’d want to
change it up again. That’s what keeps it interesting. You’re
trying to learn how to write new books. You don’t want to just
repeat the same thing.
INTERVIEWER
One evident departure in
The Marriage Plot is the
narrative voice, which is less playful, more austere, than those of
The Virgin Suicides and
Middlesex. Was it a
conscious decision to tell the story in a more restrained way?
EUGENIDES
It was. I was trying to find a narrative voice that would be at
once omniscient and authoritative, but also flavored with the
consciousnesses of the characters I was writing about. On the one
hand, it had to sound the way my characters think and be expressive
of their youth, personalities, and level of education, and on the
other it had to be flexible enough to open up gaps where authorial
comment could operate, to move in or out depending on necessity. I
don’t think the voice is austere, but it’s certainly less showy
than the voices of my other novels.
The Virgin Suicides is a book that exists purely in its
voice. The plot is given away in the first paragraph, and the
characterization is handled in an objective way. I never go into the
heads of the Lisbon girls to tell the reader what they are thinking.
That was the strategy—to make the girls mysterious and unknowable
to the boys who are so obsessed by them. These self-imposed
limitations were useful to me as a first-time novelist because, at
that point, I didn’t have the skills needed to develop character
directly, and so I managed to do it indirectly. Young writers should
be advised not to try everything at once. Often, by limiting your
options and maximizing one aspect of a book—in this case, narrative
perspective—you can achieve much more than you expect.
The progression of my work has gone as follows: from sentence, to
plot, to character. For the first ten years of my apprenticeship in
the art of fiction, all I thought about were sentences. How do you
write a good sentence? What distinguished dull or clumsy prose from
engaging, precise writing? Stylists like Nabokov and Bellow were my
models. With
Middlesex, I taught myself to plot. The
narrative strands of that book are quite complex. They depart and
interweave, and a whole lot happens. The atmosphere is completely
different from the insularity of
The Virgin Suicides. I
began to go more deeply into character in
Middlesex—to go
into people’s heads—and with
The Marriage Plot I’ve
gone even deeper. It’s a highly character-driven book. In order for
the characters to move into the foreground, the language had to
recede a bit. The sentences weren’t necessarily any easier to
write, but I was working in a Jamesian, rather than Flaubertian,
mode.
The question is, How do you move the novel forward? For a long
time, I was a card-carrying postmodernist. I thought the way to make
something new was a question of form. I think you can see that with
The Virgin Suicides. But now I don’t think it’s that
simple. A lot of the so-called experiments people attempt today are
not really new. People did them in the seventies already, or the
twenties! People forget, or just don’t know, and they’ll do
something they think is original, and it’s not.
INTERVIEWER
How have you done new things with the novel?
EUGENIDES
By a process of hybridization. By mixing the old and the new. By
pushing ahead formally at times, but also in terms of sheer content.
Middlesex is in some ways an old-fashioned novel. There are
classical allusions and epic events. At the same time, the emotional
content of the book—the realistic account of the life of an
intersex person—is not traditional at all. The general mode of the
book is postmodern, but the narrative movement is Aristotelian, and
the sensibility, while comic, is anything but ironic. With
The
Marriage Plot, I’m hybridizing again, playing off the most
traditional plot of the novel—the marriage plot—in order to
create something entirely different. Adam Thirlwell, the British
novelist, wrote a wonderful article about Roland Barthes in
The
New Republic. In it, he talks about Barthes’s theory of “the
reality effect.” Barthes believed that realism wasn’t real—it
was just a system of codes—and he mentions a passage from Flaubert
where Flaubert describes a barometer hanging on the wall. Barthes
said that Flaubert’s barometer was there only “to denote
reality.”
At the end of his life, however, Barthes came to believe that
there were certain moment in novels—the death of Bolkonsky in
War
and Peace and the death of Marcel’s grandmother in
Remembrance
of Things Past—that weren’t mere reality effects. On the
contrary, Barthes found such moments to be expressive of absolute
truth. The truth isn’t about realistic details so much, or not
entirely. It arises out of the dramatic sweep of a book. This great
literary theorist, so distrustful of realism, began to believe in
verisimilitude, in the capacity of the novel to convey meaning. And I
agree. There are moments in novels that are absolutely true—and
those are the kinds of novels I want to write.
INTERVIEWER
Is there anything in particular critics have gotten wrong about
your work? Were there misperceptions you feel were unfair or somehow
missing something you wanted to get across?
EUGENIDES
All you can ask is that the reviewer review the book you wrote,
and not some other book they
wish you had written. Some
reviews bring their own agendas to your work. For instance, some
critics were unhappy that Cal discovers his male identity largely
because he falls in love with his female best friend. Some critics
have taken issue with this because, obviously, same-sex attraction
doesn’t determine gender identity. Gay men are men. The thing is,
though,
Middlesex isn’t a novel about gay identity. It’s
a novel about intersex identity. And not
all intersex
identity, but just that of one particular person. That Cal discovers
his sexuality in the way he does is not indicative of other people’s
experience, only his. Critics like to generalize. Novelists
particularize. But many critics do review the actual book you wrote,
and that’s all you can ask.
But let me give you an example of how impermanent reviews can be.
When
Middlesex came out,
The Economist gave it a
negative review. I haven’t been reading my reviews for
The
Marriage Plot, but my mother read part of the review in
The
Economist over the phone—before I could stop her. Now the
magazine claimed to be a tiny bit disappointed by the new book. Why?
Because it didn’t live up to the “impossibly high standard” of
Middlesex! Which they hadn’t liked when it came out!
Books make their own reputations over time. That’s the thing to
remember.
INTERVIEWER
Has there ever been a negative criticism you found useful?
EUGENIDES
Writers are quite aware of the flaws in their books. We know what
we haven’t managed to do and what we’d like to do better the next
time.
INTERVIEWER
Do you write with a sense of your audience? Or is it more like
Gertrude Stein said, that you write for yourself and strangers?
EUGENIDES
I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re
writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you
have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to
explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an
intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are
smart and don’t wish to be condescended to.
I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not “audience.”
Not “readership.” Just the reader. That one person, alone in a
room, whose time I’m asking for. I want my books to be worth the
reader’s time, and that’s why I don’t publish the books I’ve
written that don’t meet this criterion, and why I don’t publish
the books I do until they’re ready. The novels I love are novels I
live for. They make me feel smarter, more alive, more tender toward
the world. I hope, with my own books, to transmit that same
experience, to pass it on as best I can.
