Jeffrey Eugenides's second novel, 'Middlesex', is a bizarre story about a hermaphrodite, US prohibition and Greco-Turkish history. But it's only autobiographical to a point, he tells Eileen Battersby.
It all began with a novel bearing an obviously unclassical title, written by a Detroit-born author answering to a name that was certainly more Asia Minor than WASP in origin.
The UK edition of the novel featured five spacy looking plastic dolls, all appearing as shocked as is possible for a plastic doll to be and each wore a small, white net veil. No hype, no fuss, no publisher's promises, yet there was something about that particular first novel that made it stand apart from and far beyond a sea of first novels.
It was 1993 and The Virgin Suicides, a suburban opera about the five Lisbon girls, all of whom kill themselves, recalled from a distance of some 20 years by the boys, now middle-aged men, who had lusted after them and never forgotten the mystery or the pain, emerged as one of the finest US novels. It is also a great, apocalyptic novel in its own right. Just as the collective narrators never forget the girls, the reader never forgets this sinister though graceful book.
All of this sounds wonderful for everyone, except perhaps for the author himself. Jeffrey Eugenides achieved the ultimate dream and nightmare all with one book - a staggering début and a long gap before the second novel.
It will be pointed out that Middlesex is an epic, twice as long as The Virgin Suicides. It not only spans eight generations in a family's history but also involves history itself - as well as a highly complex central theme, that of a genetic odyssey, the long journey of a genetic mutation, specifically 5-Alpha-Reductase deficiency, and its impact of the life of the hapless narrator. The two novels are very different, if equally strange and highly entertaining.
Above all though, the single fact that dominates any assessment of the author is exactly how well he writes. Eugenides is funny and original, possessing a surreal flair for horrifically comic detail. Middlesex is very good, but profane and profound. The Virgin Suicides has the mark of genius, it is both lament and cautionary tale; it's about a shared guilt and remorse and becomes a deadpan study in grief and longing.
So what can one possibly expect of Eugenides, the man? He looks like a composer, a Viennese composer who walked out of the 19th century and put on modern clothes for the day. Anyone in possession of an imagination this black and an intellect that sharp must be an intimidating proposition. His is a philosopher's face, relieved and enlightened by bright, open young eyes. For all his animation, there is an unusual calm about him.
It takes about two seconds to grasp that he is down-to-earth, devoid of affectation, does not consider The Virgin Suicides as a burden and will answer any question. So how did he come to write it? "It was a story I heard from my nephew's babysitter: there was this girl and she wanted to kill herself, she didn't, but she wanted to." Oh. I see. What can be said to that. Eugenides makes it all sound so easy, so relaxed, and he is speaking of a novel that consists of one remarkable observation and image after another, such as: "A cellophane body swept its arms back and forth against the slate tiles like a child drawing an angel in the snow".
He is direct and funny, very polite, pretty much the middle-class, college-educated American from somewhere else who has spent a great deal of time in Manhattan. Now 42, he looks and sounds younger and has none of the world-weary arrogance shared by many authors who have done well without being as talented as he is.
He is married to an artist and they live in Berlin with their small daughter. Why Berlin? "It's all thanks to the Berliner Künstlerprogramm. I received some grants and we've stayed on. Just haven't got around to moving yet . . ." Is his German good? "Not that great, but my Latin's okay." Ovid and Virgil were his foundation texts. Hence, perhaps, his feel for the epic; he obviously has a grasp of fate as a force.
His writing began with a great deal of experimentation. "I wrote all kinds of stories - I wrote stories throughout the writing of Middlesex - but I did start out as a prose stylist." But, unlike many stylists, Eugenides uses language with such ease the reader is unaware of the labour that must go into shaping such prose. "It's the telling of stories I'm interested in. You know, the way in which they are told."
His approach to this has been original. The use of the collective point of view in The Virgin Suicides, expressing the voyeuristic fascination of a chorus of men who had once been lustful boys, is the device that makes it outstanding rather than simply a very good novel. Of course, this leads to the inevitable question: what did he make of Sophie Coppolla's film version? "Well," he begins, with an expression which says, boy, I wish I didn't have to get into that. "I think she was very respectful of the book, but film has its own demands. It's her take on the book, but of course, it is very different."
In order to film the novel, Coppolla effectively dismantled it at source by shifting the viewpoint away from the chorus and giving it to the girls who then became characters, not icons. Unlike Peter Jackson's honourable, responsible and faithful version of The Lord of the Rings, Coppolla made a film that exists entirely independently - and left admirers of the novel unhappy, feeling it had been plundered.
Middlesex is a good name for his new book as it really does explore the territory between the two principle genders. Still, is it a family saga? A book about the emigrant experience? Or a book about genetics? Visions of 20th-century America? Or ultimately, as was The Virgin Suicides, a book about adolescence and identity? "I had this big idea, I wanted to write a book about a hermaphrodite and I wanted the person, the character, to be real, not fanciful like Orlando or mythical like Tiresias, but real and in this horrible dilemma."
It is worth pointing out that the medical detail in the novel is extensive and also that many authors might well have taken on the subject of hermaphroditism and produced a salacious yarn. Middlesex is explicit but it is never, aside from one late LA episode, sleazy. Much of this is due to the strength of the engagingly ironic narrative voice, Calliope - as the narrator begins, Cal as he develops - is a likeable and sympathetic character, case history and a natural observer with an interest in others.
Interestingly, part of Cal's success as a character is that he never becomes bitter. Instead, he retains a kind of bewildered horror at it all. Throughout the interview Eugenides refers to his narrator as "he" - "because he is a he". As he freely admits, Eugenides is no scientist. "I was poor at chemistry and physics, but I have always had an interest in biology. But I had to do a lot of research."
It is an unusual subject to have become interested in, and Eugenides refers to the French writer Michel Foucault, writing about another hermaphrodite, Alexina Barbin, who had written an autobiography. The genetic crisis befalling Calliope/Cal is the result of the marriage between his grandparents. Orphaned brother and sister, Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, flee Smyrna in 1922 as the Turkish army again decides to purge Asia Minor of its ancient, substantial and unwanted Greek population. The pair are close, so close they marry - thus creating a genetic problem common to remote places in which interbreeding occurs.
As with The Virgin Suicides, it is a bizarre story, but it is also one rooted in the odd things that happen in families and in life. "I think that it's important to say that I don't take reality and make it strange; I take things that are a bit strange and make them normal."
Although Middlesex is not autobiographical - not that I was going to ask him if it was - he does stress, "I do take elements of my life and use them. There are bits of my family history, like the Greek stuff, and I grew up in a Detroit suburb, our house was on Middlesex Avenue, in Grosse Point and all that, but yes you are right, I'm not an autobiographical writer."
The family detail is funny. It also provides Eugenides, who grew up as an American, the Stanford and Brown-educated son of an American born son of Greek emigrants, with another dimension to draw on. The Greeks in his story yell and lament with an abandon similar to the Jewish American, or the Italian American. "Yes, that's right," he says, "and they are very funny, my family are very funny." Outsiders come to belong but they also remain that bit different. Lefty in the novel works on the Ford assembly line, learns English at night and wants to become a citizen. Desdemona, theatrical in her life and her grief, remains a Greek.
Although he could not be an easier interviewee, and Middlesex is hugely readable, with the family story cleverly sharing centre stage with Cal's horrors, it is impossible not to continually bring the conversation back to The Virgin Suicides. You feel as if you want to quote passages of it to him, the groupie supplants the reporter. But its author quotes freely from it as well. Even more than Philip Roth's superb American Pastoral, it says much about America and its lengthy loss of innocence.
Eugenides also made effective and colourful use of the Greek dimension in Suicides through the character of a Greek neighbour, old Mrs Karafilis: "shaped and saddened by a history we knew nothing about. As a young woman, she had hidden in a cave to escape being killed by the Turks. She had seen family members butchered, men strung up in the sun eating their own privates, and now hearing how Tommy Riggs totalled his parents' Lincoln, or how the Perkinses' Christmas tree caught fire, killing the cat, she didn't see the drama".
Having set out to do extensive medical research for Middlesex, he found himself studying Greco-Turkish history, as well as the story of Prohibition USA. His intersexual drama became a multi-layered saga "which ends, I hope, with hope".
At present, he is writing a book about Berlin, itself a city of transformations, and one that frequently juxtaposes the beautiful and the sinister. It should prove an exciting, original view. He agrees that in fiction, indeed in writing in general, the voice is all. "I had trouble with getting the voice right in Middlesex, you want it to convince and to be real." It achieves both.
"I think it is important that we realise that the biggest crisis we ever experience is adolescence. There's a part in The Virgin Suicides when Cecilia (the youngest of the five Lisbon girls and the first to commit suicide) is asked by the doctor in the hospital after her failed attempt, why she did it and she says: 'you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl'. Nobody ever listens to the ordinary. And it is full of pain and fear." Cal's ordeal is extraordinary, but Eugenides is as interested in the ordinary as he is in the extreme, that's why he is so very, very good.
Middlesex is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99)