Jeffrey Eugenides: Enduring love
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A tall, slim, fastidious-looking man with a high, domed forehead
and a moustache and goatee that lends him a distinctly
Mephistophelean air, Jeffrey Eugenides has written just two books in
the past 15 years. The first, The Virgin Suicides, a darkly comic
fable of five suburban sisters who kill themselves, published in
1993, has sold more than a million copies, but also is said to hold
the distinction of being the most shoplifted book of modern times.
‘It’s my most famous accolade,’ Eugenides laughs,
‘although Paul Auster claims one of his books is the most
shoplifted. It’s one of those things authors argue about.’
The second book, Middlesex, an epic account of the life of a
hermaphrodite, published in 2002, has sold three million copies, won
Eugenides the Pulitzer Prize for literature, and recently led to him
being a guest on the Oprah Winfrey Show. He appeared alongside a
handful of intersex people telling their own stories, in keeping
with Oprah’s mission of self-empowerment, although Eugenides,
who describes the book as ‘a love story’, wasn’t
thinking of self-empowerment when he wrote it, and wanted to talk
about literature. It is a condition of appearing on the Oprah
Winfrey Show that guests sign a confidentiality clause, agreeing not
to discuss the show or, more particularly, Oprah. Eugenides argued
that as an author he reserved the right to his own experiences and
at some point in the future he might want to describe what it was
like to appear on television.
‘For example, one interesting thing is that your make-up is
sprayed on you from a kind of spray-gun, which apparently leaves a
beautiful matt finish. It’s like having your body painted in an
auto-shop. But I looked good, though.’ He pauses. ‘This is
OK - they said I could describe the make-up sprayer.’
Eugenides, 47, grew up in Detroit. He lived for some time in
Berlin, but is now back in America teaching creative writing at
Princeton, where he lives with his wife, Karen Yamauchi, a
photographer and sculptor, and their daughter, Georgia, nine.
Eugenides has something of a reputation for being a man of refined
tastes, and has suggested that we meet in Princeton’s finest
French restaurant - a place apparently popular with the
university’s members of faculty. Cornell West, the celebrated
philosopher and writer and the university’s professor of
religion, sits at a corner table, surrounded by acolytes.
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‘We wanted to live in a community of like-minded and
agreeable people,’ Eugenides says, casting an eye around the
room. ‘One of the ideas of moving here was to be in a swirl of
ideas. But it’ll probably be a swirl of home renovation tips;
everyone here is fixing their bathroom.’ He laughs. ‘But I
have had a couple of conversations where people have been telling me
about Aristotle, and I’ve thought, that’s what I’ve
come for%26#8230;’
Eugenides is working on a new novel - and given his track record,
it may take some time - but in the meantime he has edited an
anthology of love stories, My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead. All
proceeds from the book are going to 826Chicago, a literacy project
set up by his friend and fellow author, Dave Eggers.
The title is taken from a poem by the Roman poet Catullus, who,
Eugenides says, was the first poet in the ancient world to write
about a personal love affair in an extended way, and can therefore
be seen as the father of the love story as we know it.
Catullus’s love affair with the woman he called
‘Lesbia’ ended in tears for both of them - ‘O
wretched sorrow! Your fault it is that now my girl’s/ Eyelids
are swollen from crying’.
Which is pretty much par for the course with this particular
collection. ‘The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire
that never dims - these are lucky eventualities, but they
aren’t love stories,’ Eugenides writes in his
introduction. ‘Love stories depend on disappointment, on
unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom, and at
least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give
love a bad name.
‘I can’t think of a famous literary love story that is
happy,’ he says. ‘Let’s begin with Romeo and Juliet;
what if Romeo had gotten there, realised Juliet was just drugged and
hadn’t killed himself and she woke up: you’d be in
Hollywood schmaltz instead of Shakespeare%26#8230;’
Rather, the themes here are of dashed expectation, the dull ache
of unfulfilled longing, the bittersweet realisation that in the
absence of eternal happiness you’ll have to settle for making do.
In How to Be a Mistress Lorrie Moore offers a textbook warning to
any young girl contemplating such a thing; William Trevor’s
Lovers of Their Time offers a melancholically poignant depiction of
a travel agent and a shop girl in 1960s London conducting a
clandestine affair in the bathroom of a grand hotel; while David
Gates’s The Bad Thing is perhaps the most chilling anatomy of
the duplicities underlying a marriage you will ever read. Probably
the happiest ending is to be found in Harold Brodkey’s infamous
short story Innocence, the interior monologue of a man trying to
bring his girlfriend to orgasm through cunnilingus - an exercise
which, at 35 pages, each of which takes two to three minutes to read
- well, you work it out.
