![]() ![]() In tilting the focus so emphatically towards the wholesome and ordinary, Eugenides seems to have restricted his access to his own considerable powers. ![]() It's customary to cheer when an author moves outside his comfort zone, but I'm not sure it was such a great idea in this case. With one exception there is nothing seriously the matter with any of them. Its cast consists mostly of bright, go-getting young Ivy Leaguers, and its storyline follows their love entanglements and spiritual crises during the early 1980s as they pursue and escape each other through a variety of colourful locations that stretch from Cape Cod to Monte Carlo to Calcutta. The Marriage Plot largely (though not entirely) dispenses with the morbid element. Mass self-slaughter in The Virgin Suicides, incest and hermaphroditism in Middlesex: in both cases, the elements of what might have been merely freakish narratives were transformed by a combination of witty, vigorous prose and a cinematic sense of social and historic context into something unexpectedly capacious and pleasurable. ![]() L ooking back over Jeffrey Eugenides's first two novels, I wondered if a part of their enormous appeal might have been the way they brought together two apparently incompatible registers: the dank morbidness of the subject matter, and the graceful exuberance of the style. ![]()
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