Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides is an American novelist whose three novels — The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex, and The Marriage Plot — represent one of the most carefully constructed small bodies of work in contemporary literary fiction.

Jeffrey Eugenides has published three novels in thirty years, and all three have been significant: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002, Pulitzer Prize), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The pace is deliberate rather than slow — each novel required a decade of development, and each is formally distinct from the others. What connects them is an ambition to use the novel form to investigate questions of identity, gender, and consciousness that resist more direct treatment.

Middlesex is his masterpiece and one of the great American novels of the 2000s. Cal Stephanides narrates the history of a genetic mutation across three generations of a Greek-American family — from Smyrna in 1922 through Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s — that eventually produces Cal: a hermaphrodite raised as a girl who discovers his true biology in adolescence. The scope is enormous, the writing is precise and warm, and the family saga is one of the most richly realised in recent American fiction.

The Virgin Suicides announced his voice in an entirely different mode: short, airless, narrated by a collective of neighbourhood boys who are still trying to understand, decades later, why the five Lisbon sisters all killed themselves one summer. The novel is constructed around an absence — the inner lives of the sisters, which the boys can never access — and that absence is its subject as much as its technique.