In 1996, Granta published the “Best of Young American Novelists”
issue, and this list has been famous ever since. The Twenty under
Forty have had varying degrees of success, and everyone thinks
that someone was left off, and none of that matters because it
was, after all, a silly gimmick to sell magazines. Which it did.
Jeffrey Eugenides was on the list, as I was recently reminded
when I opened his excellent new novel Middlesex[1]
and found myself reading words I had first read in 1996.
His excerpt in Granta was from a novel in progress finally
published this September. We’ve been waiting a long time.

Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was slim, weird,
and beautiful. He wrote it while he worked at the Academy of
American Poets, and I like to think that one can tell it was
written in the company of poets. Recalling scenes from The Virgin
Suicides is like breathing ether. Your mind goes languorous and
foggy. It is a dreamscape of a book, devoid of humor, full of
soft-focus characters and the second person plural pronoun.

Characters with cameos in The Virgin Suicides are back, fully developed.
Both books take place in suburban
Detroit. Both books mention the day that tanks showed up,
grinding down the calm suburban streets, during the Detroit
riots. Middlesex, unlike The Virgin Suicides, is funny, big,
embracing, and wonderful.

“Chekov was right,” says Calliope Stephanides, the protagonist of
Middlesex,