Microscope fixed on human mysery
American novelist’s new collection of short stories salvages wit from lives of despair, writes Dwight Garner.
Like certain comets, books by Jeffrey Eugenides appear only rarely. Since 1993 he has dropped a novel a decade: The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and most recently The Marriage Plot.
He breaks that decennial cycle with Fresh Complaint, a book of stories. Perhaps this will usher in a new period of volubility. We’ll see the publication of his left-handed writing across genres: letters, a book of travel essays, an etiquette primer. Or not.
Eugenides found a critical and popular audience early. At this stage one cannot pick up a new book from him without considering W H Auden’s observation that our judgments of books by established writers aren’t merely aesthetic.
‘‘In addition to any literary merit it may have, a new book by him has a historic interest for us as the act of a person in whom we have long been interested,’’ Auden wrote. He is not only a novelist, that is, but ‘‘a character in our biography’’.
There is bad and good news about Fresh Complaint. The bad news is that there’s nothing especially intense or inventive here, no sign that short fiction is the fertile row Eugenides should have been hoeing all along.
The good news is how solid these stories are anyway. Two or three are excellent; none are total misses. Paragraph by paragraph, Eugenides writes like a man who is enjoying himself. The feeling is contagious.
He’s a consistently perceptive writer, so much so that when you put this book down it’s like leaving one of those movies that Windex-freshens the panes of your mind.
The 10 stories in Fresh Complaint were written across the expanse of his career. One of the earliest, Baster, appeared in The New Yorker in 1996. Several others first appeared in The New Yorker, as well, though others ran in Conjunctions, The Yale Review and The Gettysburg Review.
In The Marriage Plot, one of Eugenides’ characters noted the following about depression: ‘‘The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.’’
Many of Eugenides’ short stories are about mental self-mutilation. He writes with elegiac wit about middleclass, mostly educated, men and women whose lives have begun to grind them down.
But for all of its interest in failure and misbehaviour, this collection is threaded with a strong moral sensibility. Eugenides’ miserable bipeds want to behave well but there are so many obstacles in their way.
One of these stories is about two women, old friends, and the favourite book they read and reread. ‘‘Sometimes books come into your life for a reason, Della,’’ one of these women says. ‘‘It’s really strange.’’
Eugenides has written life-altering books of that sort, and Fresh Complaint isn’t one of them. But its charm and insight are real, and formidable. – NY Times