Jeffrey Eugenides
1993 - Picador, NY
Much has already been written about this book. I will write some more, since I just finished it yesterday. I also plan on now reading Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot, all of which I just purchased, all of which I just discovered, because I am in a time warp of unfathomable dimensions and never seem to catch up culturally, with anything.
We love this book because it is like the scenes on the news where we weep with victims and put our flowers out on the sidewalks and shrines around their houses, and hold candlelight vigils and sing slow and mumbled, careful songs in groups together, cathartic and removed; otherworldly.
This is the sense with which Eugenides catches us off guard at every turn, first taking us in with realism and familiarity, and then as the plot thickens, totally waking us to a new reality. The most stunning line in the book that I can recall is in the first part when he is describing the beauty and grace of the girls, and how beautiful and underrated the necks of females are with regards to their erotic power. We're all aswoon with his beatific vision of the snowy erotic neck when he then ends the sentence with a rope around that flesh. Pow. Ow. I've just been bushwhacked from nowhere by prose. Elegant. Jarring. Fantastic.
I can see from the Google Images pages after finding the image for this book cover, that young girls especially are "fans" of this work across the spectrum, most likely idealizing the subjects of the book in the way that fans of rock stars place posters on their walls. Yet young men would also find voice in this text, for in it are the associations most universal with all testosterone and early hormonal-laden infatuations and forays into the world of the female. This book so perfectly echoes the voice of the young American male of the late 60s and 70s, in that period language, but also hits a note of teenage innocence and desire that is timeless.
I am a perennial lover of Frederick Buechner, Flannery O'Connor, Tolstoy, Kerouac, and other luminaries, but Jeff has now been added to my list of authors that can absolutely astound. The aliterations and metaphors that are like a barrage of night-sky meteors frequented throughout the book, yet also planned so carefully as to be deceptively natural, have challenged me as a budding writer to aspire to this level of thinking about story.
Such as his description of time passing by. He states, and I am not quoting here, I am only writing from memory, because the memory is that strong it is so well done, "We only noted the passing of time during the days by the way our mouths tasted at various points along the way, all tooth-pasty in the morning, and like leftover bologna in the afternoon". "Like tongue film...." is another reference. Brilliant.
And I have not even read his Pulitzer Prize next novel "Middlesex". The hardcover edition, from Amazon, is sitting here staring at me now with its deceptively bland "JE" embossed in the cover (I always take the jackets off of books to read them, so they don't get all messed up).
So I shall talk with you all after that edition is done, and report what I find. Thanks again for tuning in.
Agitatus
