Eugenides Writes more than Novels

The leaves are going red and gold, Starbucks is pushing Pumpkin Spice and I’ve got the autumn cold.  It’s fall already.  Plus, the literary blockbusters are hitting the shelves/Kindles. “Literary blockbuster?  That’s an oxymoron.”  Remember one mere year ago when J. Franz (you know, Johnathan Franzen) burdened us with his Freedom?  It fell from holy Franzen heaven, from the throne gilded in golden book jacket blurbs.  That’s all I remember.  The heavy textbook knocked me into a hazy half-amnesia that made me forget every pretentious sentence I’ve ever read.  (Franzen is an easy target, I know.  Freedom is actually pretty decent.) 

So who’s the literary blockbuster star this year?  I want to say Murakami, whose upcoming IQ84 isn't mentioned without the phrase "magnum opus."  I think Wind-Up Bird is his magnum opus, with Kafka on the Shore as a kind of denouement.  It's hard to imagine anything more epic and personal, surreal and alive, existential and beautiful than Wind-Up.  That novel is pretty much everything a magnum opus should be.  If IQ84 lives up to its critical promises (it's at least ridiculously long), I'm already hyper-excited, but until then, we've got Eugenides. 

I can’t flick on npr without hearing another interview with Jeffrey freaking Eugenides.  An interview on npr is the peak of an author's celebrity.  Eugenides scored two npr interviews in one week.  This is because he’s awesome.  With a total of three good-to-great books stacked under his Pulitzer, Eugenides is nearly as respected and prolific as Salinger.  One more novel to go before total life seclusion, Jeffy boy!  What's up with the new third book, by the way? 

It's "swoon-worthy."  Damn.  I haven’t swooned since Bella agreed to marry Edward.

I’m not here to compare the Twilight series to The Marriage Plot (someone—do this).  I want to be swooned by stories as well as novels.  And since Eugenides has such a small CV, true fans must subsist on his short fiction during the long, cold winters of Franzen and Meyers.

Let’s go way back to 1996. Saddam Hussein is breathing, I’m practicing abstinence (with fervor) and Eugenides’ story “Baster” is printed in The New Yorker.  Here is a shortened version of their apt abstract:       
  

Short story about a forty-year-old unmarried woman named Tomasina who decides to become pregnant by inseminating herself using a turkey baster and the sperm from a married friend named Roland.  

Then at a party, sperm gets "switched" and the donors get mixed up. 

I have to point out that of all the Eugenides material out there, "Baster" feels the least homey.  The Virgin Suicides bathes in the burbs, Middlesex follows a family gene across space and time, and The Marriage Plot, well, I haven’t bought/read the damn thing yet.  (Send me a copy, readers!)  While I wait for one of you loyal readers to get mailin’, I can read “Baster,” right?  Sure.  Sure, if I pay The New Yorker $5.99 for an online copy of the issue.  Or screw it, I can watch the movie version of the short story, appropriately titled The Switch:

Hmm.  I love Jason Bateman, but . . . well, here’s what Eugenides says about the feature film.

The fact that the movie has a different title than the story might give you some idea of how close a correspondence exists between the two. The plot of my story takes up the first twenty or thirty minutes of the film. From there, the screenwriter developed an entirely different outcome. “Baster” is merely the premise of the film. But even that’s not quite true. My story is about an unattractive man who’s in love with a beautiful woman. It deals, comedically, with the Darwinist question: is it better to be good-looking or clever? Now,Jason Bateman isn’t unattractive. The casting went in the other direction, as they say out in Hollywood, and the movie followed it. You might say that “Baster” is to “The Switch” what cello is to cellophane.

If you watched the trailer and read the quote and still want to see the movie, let me know how that goes.

Other Eugenides stories?  "Air Mail" exists online only as a two-page excerpt.  You've got to pay for "Asleep in the Lord."   

What do you know.  This one is free:  "Great Experiment."


And so is this one: "Extreme Solitude."

I chose to read "Extreme Solitude" and realized pretty quick it's less a short story than an excerpt from The Marriage Plot.  No complaints here, though I have to admit it's kind of messed up that I set out to find a Eugenides story and end up reading a piece of his novel ("Eugenides Writes more than Novels" . . . true.  "Great Experiment" next time.) 


"Extreme Solitude" is framed like a story, though, so I'll look at it that way.  We start with Madeline, a senior college student who thinks she may be falling in love with Leonard.  Her conflict on the first page?  She'll never tell Leonard.  I'm hooked.   

Apart from this conflict, we get a pure Eugenides in the first paragraph, which is the real hook.  The opening is rich with psychology (the kind I wish I could write) and an underlying dark humor.  The rest of the story is pure breeze, despite the lack of an actual scene for a few pages, in which Madeline eats peanut butter straight from the jar and reads.  Sounds like bliss to me.  Turns out it's the source of the title.  "Extreme solitude" is a theme throughout, and brought into reflective focus as the truth behind love.  It's a revealing and sad thought on the motivations for love.  Though we get a lot Eugenides' exposition--and though I question the abundance of semicolons--the scene-less prose is as insightful and character-driven as the scenes.  When we get dialogue, it zings.  


As in a short story, Leonard is introduced and developed as part of the conflict.  Their relationship distracts me from the initial conflict, which returns at the end when Madeline says, "I love you."  Leonard's scholarly response and the resulting humor don't resolve the conflict of love--heck of a conflict--but complicate it.  

That said, the heavy doses of exposition and gradual character building reflect a novel narrative.  The complication of the conflict, rather than the resolution or forgoing of conflict, lends itself to a longer narrative. 


Rating: 3 out of 4 stars.  Writers, story dorks and readers will enjoy "Extreme Solitude."  The academic referencing and lack of heavy plot may turn off casual readers, though Eugenides does a fair job at keeping the pace steady.  For a "literary" writer, this is fun stuff. 

I'll Occupy Wall Street by reading Adbusters fiction

It’s almost difficult to focus on stories right now.  Look outside, there’s a freaking revolution.  (We have to squint pretty hard to see it from Ohio.)  I can barely believe that something is happening, regardless of its validity or outcome.  I read Adbusters for several years, and even participated in Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week.  In case you don’t follow the news or are republican or something, Adbusters is insanely, impossibly responsible for Occupy Wall Street.  It’s so ridiculous I had to use two adverbs, and I'm not a big fan of adverbs. 

That said, Adbusters sometimes features fiction stories that are not bad, if you don’t mind a dose of anti-capitalist satire now and then.  Let’s look at one, story dorks.

Have you heard of Zdravka Evtimova?  Me neither.  Turns out she’s a Bulgarian writer with a few short-story collections.  Her relative fame probably helped earn her short fiction story, “Acceptance,” a spot in the Adbusters 2010 issue titled “The Post-Postmodernism Issue.”  The Adbusters title should give you an idea of the kind of post-thinking behind the magazine.  Everything is post-, nothing is pre-. 

“Acceptance” features four characters: a writer-translator named Anna; her shaggy dog, Rain; her runaway lover, Francois; and his new wife.  Much of the opening is devoted to Anna’s lifestyle:

She worked day and night on her short stories and translations. Oceans of love roared in the books she translated into French. There was no food at home. She stared at her computer like a bat, her hair disheveled, her dictionaries scattered under the table, on the floor, in the corridor.

Knowing Evtimova’s biography as a writer-translator, I make the assumption that this story is about the author.  This assumption is a pet peeve of every writer I know, myself included.  Of course stories are linked to their authors.  Of course there are elements of our lives, inner and outer, that translate to the page.  But with fiction, readers should give the writers the fair understanding that though some elements of a text ring true with reality, the story is still a story, still fiction.  This is one way that writers come to terms with their lives.  They put actual feelings and situations within a fictional context, which—if all goes well—makes difficult perceptions easier to understand.

It’s also easy to assume that Rain, the shaggy dog in “Acceptence,” is Anna or a physical manifestation of her writer lifestyle.  Like Anna’s living space, Rain is a dirty mess.  Like Anna, much of the opening is devoted to Rain, so-called because “his steps sounded like raindrops rolling down a windowpane after midnight.”  (Evtimova continues the raindrop metaphor and other poetic/abstract imagery throughout.  For instance: “The dog brought autumn in its wake, it almost always started to drizzle when Rain went out.”)  Anna’s lover Francois wants to leave her, but stays to take care of Rain, who is neglected by Anna.  This is what we are told, and we see is Francois taking care of Anna as well.  He makes her sandwiches and she “wolfs them down” (tense changed).  Anna’s “wolfing” is the most direct textual link between her and the dog.  When Francois leaves Anna, it is because he hates “her dog and her love.”  Francois feels largely unloved, or loved in the wrong way—Anna “called him names as bad as November downpours" during uninvited lovemaking.

Francois leaves and Rain howls after his departing train.  Though Francois feels guilt—how will Anna make her own sandwiches?  Will Rain get hit by a train?—he makes a new life.  He gets married, makes money, gets a clean house, lives the dream, I guess.  He gets a dog and names it Rain, so it’s obvious he needs some aspect of his old life.  Years later, he returns to Anna’s place for no apparent reason—no clear motivation is given, other than brandy and plot—and sees “the most beautiful girl he had ever seen.”  Is it Anna or what?  This moment is unclear, and will likely piss off readers that prefer direct certainty to abstract metaphors.  To frustrate matters, the girl isn’t mentioned again.  Instead, we get the sound of raindrops, and you know what that means.  Francois turns to see Rain, shabbier and thinner than ever before.  Francois is so joyous we are given the first line of dialogue of the whole freaking story—“Rain! Rain!”—soon followed by the last line of dialogue of the whole freaking story—“How’s Anna?” 

I summarize the story to point out a couple things.  One, Rain and Anna are basically interchangeable.  In an interview, Evtimova says “To live in Bulgaria means to want to write all the time,” and goes on to talk about all the stray dogs and how people deal with them.   I guess she solves writing and mangy dogs in one story—they’re the same thing that adds up to an allegory.  Two, I imagine that Adbusters chose to publish this story because of its rejection of the conventional, both in style and content.  (Adbusters also tries to present a global perspective with international writers.)  Evtimova’s prose rejects conventional approaches such as dialogue breaks and definite descriptions.  (It’s worth noting that her language is clear and near simple.)  But most of all, and what I noted with the first point, is that the whole story is an allegory, much like other Adbusters fiction.  Francois returns to the scene of his former life out of some unexplained pull.  From “Acceptance:” “He didn’t go on business; he even didn’t want to meet Anna.”  If it’s not business or Anna, then what is he seeking?  More: “There were no peaceful afternoons and silver rains in the town on the Nordsee where he lived. There were clean carpets, brand new electrical appliances, neatly arranged books and pictures in his house. There wasn’t a single dictionary there.”  Francious is seeking some old truth that in his financial “mainstream” success he has lost.  A clean house and new appliances won’t answer the questions of love and existence, or whatever it is he wants answered.  When he sees Rain, he now knows why he came: “How’s Anna?”  Literally, he still cares for Anna as a person, and as a reader this last line gave me a dropper-full response of empathy.  But as a critical reader I see Francious as curious and wanting of Anna—who is the dirty dog, who is the countercultural option in society—only because his new life is vapid—capitalism did not grant him love, or something.  Yet his new wife gives him love.  This is all we know about her character.  So Francois has love, but it is somehow the wrong love—the wrong choice.  Maybe the allegory is not so simple.  Maybe there are no right choices, dogs or clean houses.  Maybe we will always regret at times the choices we make, and sometimes wonder the question—no matter how clean or dirty our lives are—and we have to ask if "clean" and "dirty" here represent the opposite of their commonplace uses--“What if?”

Or if you’re Adbusters and the title of the story is “Acceptance,” the allegory probably involves accepting a lifestyle or love that is in an intangible way truer than those offered by “mainstream” or hegemonic society/culture.    

The online comment section of “Acceptance” shows that readers view this story as beautifully written, and I have to agree that Evtimova uses some wonderfully abstract metaphors and similes.  One comment embedded after “Acceptance” gives us a more Adbustery response: “Long Live Our Glorious Revolution.”  What revolution?

This question is why I gave up Adbusters.  What revolution?  

I gave up Adbusters a couple years ago, about the same time I entered graduate school.  Every Adbusters preached the same dreary stuff: We are living in a postmodern apocalypse, the earth is going to explode, our lives are meaningless and our children will eat each other to survive.  We suck.  Though I got into Adbusters because they articulated my feelings about consumer culture, I got sick of their nihilistic hopelessness.  The issues were too dark, too bleak.  Come on, Adbusters.  What revolution?  Even the self-proclaimed anarchists I know have “HOPE” tattooed on their arms, no kidding, and Adbusters failed to show me any hopeful answer beyond turning off the TV.  Freaking duh.  And now this little hopeless magazine has kicked off something (again, regardless of validity or outcome of this something). 

I have to wonder if I was the one who lost hope.  It was me that retreated into short stories and novels, hid in writing workshops, typed over-analytical blog entries about short stories.  I thought the academic world was the place for someone with no place.  I thought that the “revolution” would never occur and that I was powerless to make it occur.  I would go to grad school and (hopefully) get a job, pursue my individual dream of publication, eat local vegan food, hang out with my partner and child in a TV-free living room filled with good books.  We would make our own tiny culture-bubble within the septic tank of capitalist crap. 

But I saw and still see a need for a paradigm shift in global thinking.  A shift from pride to respect, from greed to compassion, from power to love.

To be fair, I have to question if Occupy Wall Street is the Revolution.  Take this quote from a column by Charles Krauthammer, who sees OWS as the outcome of hypocritical liberals (beginning with Obama, not Adbusters) scapegoating wealthy conservatives: 

To the villainy-of-the-rich theme emanating from Washington, a child is born: Occupy Wall Street. Starbucks-sipping, Levi’s-clad, iPhone-clutching protesters denounce corporate America even as they weep for Steve Jobs, corporate titan, billionaire eight times over.

These indignant indolents saddled with their $50,000 student loans and English degrees have decided that their lack of gainful employment is rooted in the malice of the millionaires on whose homes they are now marching -- to the applause of Democrats suffering acute tea party envy and now salivating at the energy these big-government anarchists will presumably give their cause.

Except that the real tea party actually had a program — less government, less regulation, less taxation, less debt. What’s the Occupy Wall Street program? Eat the rich.

And then what? Haven’t gotten that far.

No postprandial plans. But no matter. After all, this is not about programs or policies. This is about scapegoating, a failed administration trying to save itself by blaming our troubles — and its failures — on class enemies, turning general discontent into rage against a malign few.

To Krauthammer’s well-phrased position, I have to ask: Even if OWS is a kind of scapegoating—blaming “class enemies” for “our troubles”—does this negate any truths behind the protesters’ message?  Is their argument invalidated?  Well, what are the truths behind their message?  Though there isn’t any one specific demand or even message of OWS (true to Adbusters-anarchist “form”), there is the consensus that injustices which cause “our troubles” are the result of the social-political-capitalist system (devolved by Krauthammer to “class enemies”). 

The truth is that the system is messed up and people have reached a boiling point.  Even if the system isn’t messed up—even if we try to accept that the cycles of poverty and racism have nothing to do with the rich staying rich, even if we somehow are convinced that capitalism and consumerism are good for humanity, even if we blindly believe that our greed isn’t destroying our planet—we still have to confront the truth that “our troubles” need addressed. 

And in addressing these troubles, we see—some of us think we see—that our problems are part of a global structure of class and power that perpetrates injustices for its own cause.

To repeat my point: I saw and still see a need for a paradigm shift in global thinking.  A shift from pride to respect, from greed to compassion, from power to love.  If I were camped out on Wall Street, this would be my message.

What do I do now?  What can we do for Occupy Wall Street?   

If you’re a writer, you can sign to support Occupy Wall Street.  Salman Rushdie and other big big names haved signed. 

Want to donate to the OWS library?  Click here.

Finally, the world needs stories.  Get out there and write about it.

Then I’ll read it.

"Acceptance" by Zdravka Evtimova: 2.5 Stars.  Writers, Story Dorks and some Readers will enjoy it.   

Just what is a story dork?

Story Dork: Someone who really likes reading short stories for any reason. 

Rating System for stories:

                1 Star: Writers will enjoy this.

                2 Stars: Writers and story dorks will enjoy this.

                3 Stars: Writers, story dorks and readers will enjoy this.

                4 Stars: Writers, story dorks, readers and casual readers will enjoy this.