Reconstruction: Jeffrey Eugenides
Christopher Beha, 6 October 2011
This is a strange book, but deceptively so: one of its strangest features is to appear to be aggressively conventional. In his short, spare first novel, The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides used an elegiac first-person-plural narrative to turn the deaths of five suburban sisters into a myth of postwar American decay. His Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller Middlesex was much baggier, a...