Jeffrey Eugenides

The author of “The Marriage Plot” and “Middlesex” says the best marriage plot novel of all time is Henry James’s “Portrait of a Lady,” because it presents an “anti-marriage” plot.

Jeffrey Eugenides

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By the Book: Archive (May 3, 2012) What book is on your night stand now?



Right now I’m shuttling between “The Map and the Territory,” by the French novelist Michel Houellebecq, and the Patrick Melrose novels by Edward St. Aubyn, which everyone I know seems to be reading.



Houellebecq’s known for being a provocateur. He’ll say things like “Life was expensive in the west, it was cold there; the prostitution was of poor quality.” His book “Platform,” which is about sex tourism and Islamic terrorism, got him sued in France. What’s less appreciated is how acute he is on the subjects of business and the macro effects of global capitalism. His books are the strangest confections: part Gallic anomie, part sociological analysis, part Harold Robbins. He says a lot of depressing, un-American things I get a big kick out of.



What’s the last truly great book you read?



“The Love of a Good Woman,” by Alice Munro. There’s not one story in there that isn’t perfect. Each time I finished one, I just wanted to lie down on the floor and die. My life was complete. Munro’s prose has such a surface propriety that you’re never prepared for the shocking places her stories take you. She pulls off technical feats, too, like changing the point of view in each section of a single story. This is nearly impossible to do while carrying the necessary narrative freight forward, but she makes it look easy. Most readers don’t notice how technically inventive Munro is because her storytelling and characterization overwhelm their attention.



And what’s the best marriage plot novel ever?



“The Portrait of a Lady,” by Henry James. Unlike the comedies of Austen, where the heroines all get married at the end, this book presents an anti-marriage plot. Old Mr. Touchett gives Isabel Archer a huge inheritance in order to secure her independence. The irony, however, is that the money ends up attracting the wrong suitor. James fills the book with the traditional energies of a marriage plot. You’ve got Caspar Goodwood and Lord Warburton courting Isabel, too, but here the heroine makes the wrong choice (the connoisseur!), and the question isn’t who will she marry but how will she survive her marriage. It’s much darker than anything Austen did, and it leads straight to the moral ambiguities and complexities of the modern novel.



And the most useful book you read while at Brown?



I arrived at college keen to develop a life philosophy. The idea was to begin with the Greeks and stop somewhere around Nietzsche. By reading the canonical works, I thought I could bring an order to my mind that would manifest itself in my behavior and decisions. Now, 30 years later, I look back and have to admit it didn’t happen. I’ve forgotten a lot of what I read at college. It’s all in pieces, bright patches of embroidered detail about Augustan Rome or early Islam or Renaissance Italy or the modernists, but not a complete tapestry. I’ve got Jacques Barzun’s “From Dawn to Decadence” on my bookshelf here. That’s the kind of book I’m a sucker for. I want to get it all explained in one shot. But you know what? I’ve tried to read that book three separate times, and I never get past Page 50.



In the end, it was the useless books I read at college that have stayed with me. I think of the last pages of “Lolita,” where Humbert Humbert hears children’s voices and recognizes the harm he’s brought Dolores Haze, and the sentence comes immediately back: “I stood listening to that musical vibration from my lofty slope, to those flashes of separate cries with a kind of demure murmur for background, and then I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita’s absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that concord.” To see a writer describe the world with such specificity, and to learn that this formulation of words went beyond words — that it taught you about pity and shame, as well as beauty, liveliness and compassion — that’s what stuck with me. Not a coherent system, maybe. But a few constellations to set my course by.



Any guilty reading pleasures — book, periodical, online?



The only thing I’m high-minded about is literature. It’s not an elitist stance; it’s temperamental. Whenever I try to read a thriller or a detective novel I get incredibly bored, both by the language and the narrative machinery. Since I’m so naturally virtuous on the literary front, I don’t see why I can’t slum elsewhere, and I do, guiltlessly. I’m the guy in the waiting room flipping through People. Bellow said that fiction was “the higher autobiography,” but really it’s the higher gossip.



What was the last book that made you cry?



“The South Beach Diet.”



The last book that made you laugh?



The Houellebecq and St. Aubyn are both making me laugh, but the St. Aubyn is more intentionally funny. And Christopher Hitchens’s memoir “Hitch-22.” There’s a line in there that goes something like, “By that time, my looks had declined to such a degree that only women would go to bed with me.”



The last book that made you furious?



It’s a while ago now, but James Atlas’s biography of Saul Bellow irked me to no end. Bellow’s talent fills Atlas with envy. And so he avoids any true accounting of the work to spend his time telling the reader that Bellow wasn’t so hot in the sack, etc. But readers of literary biographies don’t want to sleep with their subjects; they want to read them.



You grew up in Detroit. What should someone who really wants to understand the city read?



I’m trying to think how to answer this in a way that doesn’t sound self-important. Give me a minute.



You teach creative writing at Princeton. What books do you find most useful as a teacher?



I teach a writing workshop, so there’s not a big reading list. It’s “useful” (you like that word) to provide models of the form: Chekhov, Joyce’s “Dubliners,” etc. But I teach undergraduates, and sometimes they’re not ready to receive the lessons in craft that those writers exemplify. The story I assign every year that gets my students most enthralled with the idea of writing fiction is “Jon,” by George Saunders.



Your first novel was made into a film by Sofia Coppola. If “The Marriage Plot” were made into a movie and you could give the director a few words of advice, what would they be?



Well, I should be able to give the director a few words of advice, because I’m co-writing the screenplay with him. In fact, we had drinks the other day, and I said: “Forget about making a faithful adaptation. What we have to do is break the book apart and find a cinematic equivalent of its literary mechanics.” What you want, if your novel becomes a movie, is for the movie to be good. Of course, you want to tell the same story. But you have to find a new way of presenting it. Plus, I wrote the book already. It would be boring to replicate it scene by scene. As well as unwise.



What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?



My worst book. I wish someone would write that one so I won’t have to.



You’re organizing a dinner party of writers and can invite three authors, dead or alive. Who’s coming?



First I call Shakespeare. “Who else is coming?” Shakespeare asks. “Tolstoy,” I answer. “I’m busy that night,” Shakespeare says. Next I call Kafka, who agrees to come. “As long as you don’t invite Tolstoy.”  “I already invited Tolstoy,” I tell him. “But Kundera’s coming. You like Milan. And you guys can speak Czech.”  “I speak German,” Kafka corrects me.



When Tolstoy hears that Kundera’s coming, he drops out. (Something about an old book review.) So finally I call Joyce, who’s always available. When we get to the restaurant, Kafka wants a table in back. He’s afraid of being recognized. Joyce, who’s already plastered, says, “If anyone’s going to be recognized, it’s me.” Kundera leans over and whispers in my ear, “People might recognize us too if we went around with a cane.”



The waiter arrives. When he asks about food allergies, Kafka hands him a written list. Then he excuses himself to go to the bathroom. As soon as he’s gone, Kundera says, “The problem with Kafka is that he never got enough tail.” We all snicker. Joyce orders another bottle of wine. Finally, he turns and looks at me through his dark glasses. “I’m reading your new book,” he says. “Oh?” I say. “Yes,” says Joyce.



You’ve said your next book will be a collection of stories. Any recent short story collections you’d recommend?



How about a long story? Claire Keegan’s “Foster.” It’s told from the point of view of an Irish girl whose parents, lacking the money to care for her, send her to live with childless relatives, whom she ends up preferring. The ending is absolutely heartbreaking, every single word in the right place and pregnant with double meanings.



You can bring three books to a desert island. Which do you choose?



The King James Bible. “Anna Karenina.” And a how-to book on raft-building.



What do you plan to read next?



T. M. Luhrmann’s “When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship With God.” I’m reading this despite my aversion to books with colons in their titles. Luhrmann’s an anthropologist who teaches at Stanford. I heard an interview with her on the radio and was struck by how nonjudgmental she sounded. And it’s a subject that interests me for a lot of reasons, historical, political and artistic.