Salon.com > Jeffrey Eugenides

Whispering sweet post-structuralist nothings

Mon, 11 Feb 2013 21:00:00 +0000

My favorite love song of the past few years is “Video Games,” by Lana Del Ray because of the third line of the chorus. It's the song's most burlesque moment, a come-on that should feel scuzzy and hackneyed, that should ruin everything: “I heard that you like the bad girls, honey.” But it catapults the song over all the barricades I’ve erected in my soul against love songs and against songs in which the singer self-identifies as “bad.” The reason is that the melody in which this particular line is sung cuts against its meaning. Because the words are about sex, you’d expect the song’s heretofore sultry melody to remain sultry or wax sultrier. Instead, on the words “bad girls, honey,” the vocal goes high, chaste, folky. If you only heard this snippet of melody, without words or context, you’d guess it belonged in an Indigo Girls song about ghosts or injustice, or in a lament about Scotland. That’s why the “bad girls, honey” kills me: The words are able to register as hot because the notes are cold. The operative principle here — you can get away with saying something very warm if you deliver it in a cold medium — also explains why Lana Del Ray gave this warmest of torch songs the coldest of names.

Ten emerging writers win $50K Whiting Awards

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 12:56:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- "Middlesex" author Jeffrey Eugenides doesn't remember everything about the night he was given a Whiting Writers' Award, but he has never forgotten how the honor received early in his career helped make his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel possible.

Eugenides, who on Tuesday night was to present the award to this year's 10 recipients, is one of many top American authors and playwrights who early in their careers won the honor. It is given to those who exhibit "exceptional talent and promise."

"I remember it was a very rainy night and on my way to the ceremony the back of my trousers became sopping wet," Eugenides, who won in 1993, said during a recent telephone interview. "It was a good way to forestall any moment of grandiosity because I assumed that everyone was looking at my soggy bottoms."

He said he was so excited to win that he has forgotten who handed him his Whiting. But he considers the prize the "first vote of confidence" from someone besides his publisher and values the award's "extreme practical" value and how it made him feel "part of the writerly world."

Eugenides on Denis Johnson: “Blistering, brilliant”

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 18:01:00 +0000

A short story must be, by definition, short. That’s the trouble with short stories. That’s why they’re so difficult to write.

How do you keep a narrative brief and still have it function as a story? Compared to writing novels, writing short fiction is mainly a question of knowing what to leave out. What you leave in must imply everything that’s missing.

If you’d like to learn how to do this, you’d be well advised to study Denis Johnson’s blisteringly acute “Car Crash While Hitchhiking.” In this story — and indeed, in all of the stories in Johnson’s brilliant collection, "Jesus’ Son" — Johnson found a way to leave out the maximum in terms of plot, setting, characterization, and authorial explanation while finding a voice that suggested all these things, a voice whose brokenness is the reason behind the narrative deprivation, and therefore a kind of explanation itself.

Jeffrey Eugenides: I don’t know why Jodi Picoult is belly-aching

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 20:48:00 +0000

Jeffrey Eugenides is not wearing a vest. He looks more professorial (albeit a professor with a porny mustache) than that cocksure author who spent parts of last fall on a Times Square billboard, clad in an almost jaunty vest. The billboard, promoting Eugenides' latest novel, "The Marriage Plot," spawned its own Twitter feed and lots of jealousy among other writers -- even a parody earlier this year by Jennifer Weiner.

Indeed, Eugenides -- like Jonathan Franzen -- is that rare writer so successful with both readers and critics that he tends to be at the center of debates that have nothing to do with his work. "The Marriage Plot" (just available in paperback) made plenty of top-10 lists but was shut out from the list of Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalists -- stoking arguments about whether those awards were out of touch with readers. (It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award; 2002's "Middlesex" won the Pulitzer.)

Hit me with your vest shot: Weiner pokes fun at Eugenides ad

Fri, 29 Jun 2012 12:00:00 +0000

Best-selling author and Twitter-whirlwind Jennifer Weiner has launched a very funny online campaign for her new book, "The Next Best Thing." Weiner appears in a vest reminiscent of the one novelist Jeffrey Eugenides sported on a Times Square billboard advertising "The Marriage Plot" last summer. A billboard, one might recall, that astonished tourists and readers alike with its portrayal of a literary writer as a macho figure. (The words “swoon-worthy” appeared above the billboard, and we know they were talking about the book, but still.) The vest led to numerous humorous online discussions as well as, naturally, the creation of the @eugenidesvest Twitter account.

“Jeffrey Eugenides doesn’t have a book out this summer,” says the ad, “but Jennifer Weiner has 'The Next Best Thing.'”

On the one hand, the campaign is pretty insidery, perhaps targeted only at those readers who spend half their life on Twitter and obsess about things such as which authors are getting a Times Square billboard and which are not.

Spoiler alert! What makes a great ending?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

The endings of novels are, in their own way, as crucial as the endings of years, but they are much less discussed. Any bibliophile can rattle off at least a handful of famous first lines ("It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...;" "It is a truth universally acknowledged...; " "It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen," and so on), but ask someone to quote a memorable closer and chances are all they can come up with is F. Scott Fitzgerald's "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" (from "The Great Gatsby") or James Joyce's rhapsodic "...and yes I said yes I will Yes."

The trick of a good ending, of course, is that it must capture and equal everything that has gone before. The line "He loved Big Brother" (from a novel that ends as masterfully as it begins) means very little until you understand exactly who Big Brother is. A first line or opening scene need only arrest a reader's attention and stoke her curiosity; a final scene or paragraph is expected to provide that sensation so rare in real life: completion. The better the book, the more nuanced and persuasive, the more difficult this is. We want a novel to swell with a sense of limitless possibility at the start and in the middle, but we also want it to zero in to a point of inevitability as it ends.