Where to Start with Jeffrey Eugenides: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Jeffrey Eugenides — whether to begin with Middlesex, The Virgin Suicides, or The Marriage Plot. A complete reading guide to his novels.
Jeffrey Eugenides (born 1960) is one of the most precise and most ambitious American novelists of his generation — a writer who has published only three novels across thirty years but whose work is dense with intelligence, formal ambition, and emotional richness. Each of his novels is built around a large structural conceit (a Greek-American family’s genetic secret, a collective male obsession with dead girls, the collision between Victorian narrative forms and contemporary life) that he uses to think about the forces — genetics, culture, gender, literary convention — that shape what we become. His sentences are perfectly controlled; his characters are fully realised; his narrative imagination is genuinely original.
Where to Start: Middlesex (2002)
The essential Eugenides — winner of the Pulitzer Prize and one of the most formally ambitious American novels of the early twenty-first century. Cal Stephanides narrates his own family’s history from a Greek village in 1922, where his grandparents (also siblings) flee the burning of Smyrna and eventually arrive in Detroit, through the decades of Greek-American life in Michigan, the riots of 1967, and his own adolescence as Callie — a girl who discovers at fourteen that she is biologically male.
The genetic mutation that makes Cal’s story possible is traced through three generations with the precision of a biological thriller; the family saga is written with the warmth and comedy of a great immigrant novel; and Cal’s own coming-of-age story is among the most original and most moving in recent American fiction. The novel asks what makes us who we are — and answers: everything and nothing, simultaneously.
The Virgin Suicides (1993)
Eugenides’s debut — and his most atmospheric and least consoling novel. A group of suburban Michigan boys, now middle-aged men, have spent twenty-five years trying to understand why the five Lisbon sisters — daughters of a devout Catholic couple in an ordinary house on an ordinary street — all killed themselves in 1974. The novel is narrated by the boys collectively, from the evidence they have assembled: diaries, photographs, the memories of people who knew the girls better. But the mystery has no solution. The girls remain opaque; the boys’ obsession reveals only their own limitation.
The novel is short, precise, and haunting — its suburban Michigan atmosphere (the elm blight, the fish flies, the muffled interior lives of girls whose windows the boys could only gaze at) is one of the great evocations of place in American fiction.
The Marriage Plot (2011)
Eugenides’s most explicitly literary and most psychologically detailed novel — a study of three Brown University graduates in the early 1980s navigating love, mental illness, and the inadequacy of the narrative forms they have inherited. Madeleine Hanna, writing a senior thesis on the marriage plot in Victorian fiction, is in love with Leonard Bankhead, who is brilliant, charismatic, and bipolar. Mitchell Grammaticus, quietly devoted to Madeleine, sets off on a spiritual journey through Europe and India while Madeleine and Leonard marry and their marriage is slowly destroyed by Leonard’s illness.
The novel is Eugenides’s most directly personal — he spent years in Providence himself in the 1980s — and his most interested in the collision between what we expect life to be (shaped by the novels we’ve read) and what it actually turns out to be.
Reading Jeffrey Eugenides
Eugenides’s fiction is formally ambitious without being difficult: his novels are pleasurable and emotionally engaging even as they think seriously about large questions (what is identity? how do we understand those we love? how do inherited narratives shape what we want?). He is a novelist of patience — three novels in thirty years — and each book rewards the attention it asks for. Begin with Middlesex for the most complete and most celebrated demonstration of his range; read The Virgin Suicides for the more concentrated and atmospheric work; approach The Marriage Plot for the most novelistic in the traditional sense.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Jeffrey Eugenides?
Middlesex (2002) is both the most widely celebrated and the best starting point — the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel narrated by Cal Stephanides, who was born with a recessive gene mutation that caused him to be raised as a girl and to discover in adolescence that he is biologically male. The novel traces the mutation's history from a Greek village in 1922 through three generations of the Stephanides family in Detroit, and it is simultaneously a family saga, a coming-of-age story, and a meditation on identity, genetics, and what it means to be American. The Virgin Suicides is the best alternative for readers who want Eugenides's most atmospheric and most compressed work.
What is Middlesex about?
Middlesex (2002) is narrated by Cal Stephanides, a hermaphrodite (born with a rare genetic condition resulting from a recessive gene carried by his grandparents' incestuous marriage in Greece) who was raised as Callie and discovered his biological maleness at fourteen. The novel unfolds in two parallel streams: the family saga, tracing the gene's history from the burning of Smyrna in 1922 through three generations of Greek Americans in Detroit; and Cal's own story, from birth through adolescence, the discovery of his condition, and his eventual identity as a man. Eugenides uses the unusual narrative premise to think about what shapes identity: genetics, family, culture, chance.
What is The Virgin Suicides about?
The Virgin Suicides (1993) is narrated by a group of unnamed men who, as suburban Michigan boys in the early 1970s, were obsessed with the five Lisbon sisters — Cecilia, Lux, Bonnie, Mary, and Therese — and who are still obsessed with them decades later, having spent years collecting evidence about why the girls all killed themselves within a year of their thirteen-year-old sister Cecilia's first attempt. The novel is a mystery without a solution: the narrators have all the evidence but no understanding, and Eugenides uses this distance to create something that is simultaneously a novel about suburban suffocation, female adolescence, and the male gaze that claims to love what it cannot see.
What is The Marriage Plot about?
The Marriage Plot (2011) is set in 1982 at Brown University and follows three characters: Madeleine Hanna, an English major writing her thesis on the marriage plot in Victorian novels; Leonard Bankhead, a brilliant, charismatic biology student with bipolar disorder; and Mitchell Grammaticus, a religious studies student in love with Madeleine who is seeking meaning through Eastern spirituality. The novel traces their post-graduation lives — Madeleine's marriage to Leonard and its destruction by his illness, Mitchell's pilgrimage through India and Mother Teresa's mission in Calcutta — as an examination of how the narrative templates we inherit (the marriage plot, the spiritual quest) both shape and fail us.
