Tag Archives: Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides and the Omniscient First Person

Posted on by Amanda

I Capturepolished off The Virgin Suicides a bit ago, and I don’t really have the time (or the memory, at this point) to post an overview. But I wanted to talk about how Eugenides continually combines two perspectives without causing a disaster.

I spoke a bit about this in my last post, which was on Middlesex. Eugenides does this magical thing that allows him to cheat normal literary rules. More about this in a second. First…

The First Person

When your narrator introduces her/himself to you, the reader, as “I,” the story is being told in the first person perspective. It adds a humanizing element that’s harder to capture in other points of view. You get to hear what the narrator is thinking about everything that’s going on, and it gives you a chance to see things through someone’s eyes in a way that’s natural and tinged with personality.

It’s easy writing. I’m wretched at writing fiction myself, but whenever I attempt it, I seek the shelter of the first person immediately. But it can also be a clever device. It’s been a long time since I read Fight Club, but I’m certain it’s in the first person—it’s a great way to hide things you don’t want readers to know yet, in a way that doesn’t seem suspicious. And I’m sure everyone remembers being taught to look for The Great Gatsby‘s unreliable narrator. It’s the first person point of view that allows these kinds of nuanced relationships with the reader.

But there are constraints when you pick this perspective. First, you’re really committing to this character, and no other, for the long haul. You’re also committing the reader to a lot of time with him/her, so you better write someone who’s enjoyable (or at least interesting) company. And in adopting one character’s point of view, you mostly cede that of others.

Omniscience

Like God, or Santa, the omniscient perspective sees all. It is, in fact, watching you right now.

It can dive into the minds of other characters. It can describe facts and events without worrying the reader with bias. It can describe a thing inside, outside, up close and far away.

Mostly, the omniscient view will be told from the third person perspective. It’s a good storytelling perspective, but it puts can put a space between the reader and the story, whereas the first person uses a character’s voice as our portal to the story and thereby brings the reader close. In some cases, like in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, this distance is important to the atmosphere of the book, but in other cases, it can make writing for engagement a bit of an extra challenge.

And the Second Person Omniscient?

It’s the creepiest of all points of view.

(Sorry, that’s something my husband said that makes me bust out laughing every time I think of it.)

Why they shouldn’t work together

Pronouns. First person: “I.” Omniscient: “he/she.”

I’m being facetious, though. If you’re telling the story from one perspective, you can’t just switch to another when it’s convenient. Or you can, but it will be jarring unless you do it really, really well. Most authors who try this don’t do it well. It just comes off as distracting and gimmicky.

Why they do for Eugenides

Eugenides does something really interesting, though. He writes from an omniscient point of view, usually reserved for the third person, and tells it via the first person voice. Twice now I’ve seen him execute it in a book, and it’s fascinating to watch how it works.

In Middlesex, the main character speaks as “I” but claims traces the past for generations before him. He’s able to speak to the reader with the closeness that first person provides but not about things he could have possibly experienced. He explains this is possible because he did exist, as genes inside his ancestors, watching all that went on. This character frequently describes floating around in the DNA of his grandparents. It really works.

In The Virgin Suicides, the story is told from the perspective of one of the boys that watched the main characters (a group of repressed sisters) as children. As watchers from outside the house, outside the minds of these girls, how could readers come to know the story as well as they do through this boy’s perspective?

Well, one of the premises of the book is that these boys were infatuated with these girls. Even when the young men became adults, the sisters haunted their thoughts. So they sought out and interviewed people who knew the girls before they died, people from their pasts, and pieced together all the information given them to fill in the holes left by memories from the outside perspective. That’s how Eugenides once again tells a complete omniscient story from the first person perspective.

It’s great fun to watch, and I welcome you to look for how he does it if you wind up picking up these books.

Signing off for now to go read my new delight: Empire Falls by Richard Russo. I’m having a great time, and I can’t wait to tell you about it. It has the most wretched characters. Look forward to hearing all about that.

Middlesex: Overview

Posted on by Amanda

CaptureBy way of introduction, I’ll say this: the first thing I did upon finishing Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex was buy another book by Jeffrey Eugenides. I mean, the instant I closed the book, that was the very next thing I did.

Tl;Dr Synopsis

An intersex male-identifying protagonist describes a family history from his grandparents up to the present, featuring his current life events.

Wow, I can’t believe that long, winding, beautiful book can be summed up in a single sentence.

Writing Style

Eugenides is funny and easy to read. Yet there’s a literary voice and knowledge of device that differentiates his book from a comedian’s journal. He combines the ancient with the modern (which, incidentally, is a huge theme in the book) by using turns of phrase found in the literature of Greek antiquity to describe his story. And his writing packs a punch right from the beginning. He starts with “I was born twice.” (What!? So good!)

Here’s the introductory sentence in its entirety:

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

Now this is the way to start a book.

Eugenides had something going on in Middlesex that I at first wanted to call a giant hole in his writing abilities, and that was the treatment of a first-person perspective as omniscient. If you can’t quite recall all the terms from your junior high reading courses, that just means that he was writing as an “I” but saying things an “I” couldn’t possibly know–what other characters were thinking, exact conversations that were had while he was in the womb. But he addressed this in the most interesting way. He portrayed himself as actually being the mutation lying dormant in the bodies that came before him, allowing him to be present at all previous events through ancestors. This suits the novel so well, since so much identity comes to him through not just his Greek heritage and family values, but also the gene that makes him who he is.

–And now, a quick break for who he is–

Here’s a quick rundown of the non-cis-gender identities, as best I know. (This was probably the best source I found.) I needed a primer, so maybe you do, too. Please, anyone, correct me if you find these to be wrong, and I’ll update.

Transgender–Umbrella term for those who don’t feel the gender identity assigned to them at birth reflects who they really are. (See Caitlyn Jenner, or better yet, read the awesome letter from Lilly Wachowski of The Matrix fame)

Transsexual–sometimes used to describe a transgender person that has chosen to make biological changes via hormone therapy or surgery. The term is becoming passe and is, frankly, a little personally invasive.

Transvestite–Ye olde term for a transgender person that meant “cross-dresser”: considered offensive today.

Intersex–Formerly “hermaphrodite” (a etymologically misleading word not really used anymore), this means that a person was born with ambiguous anatomy. Cal from Middlesex is intersex. When born, he appeared to his half-blind doctor to fully female and was raised as such. A closer look would have shown some anatomy to be atypical, and he carried an XY chromosome pair–the set used to classify humans as male.  See here for more detail, or just read the book. The narrator is very open about what’s going on.

Note: none of these things have anything to do with what gender an individual is attracted to. That’s something else entirely.

–End break–

Another thing that really makes the writing in this engaging is that the author communicates so well about things that not many people understand. The description of Cal growing up and trying to understand bodies and attraction and identity brings to life a kind of struggle many people could never imagine. I couldn’t.

Eugenides also puts within reach the kind of things that happen slowly and are therefore hard to pinpoint: the development of superstition, the attitudes toward race, the slow decay of love. I feel like I look around at the people around me sometimes and think, “How did you even get to this place?” But after reading Middlesex, I don’t know…it’s just seems easier to understand things that happen even around me, outside of the book’s scope. 

Characters

Cal is a beautiful, empathetic narrator. He’s the perfect person to tell the story of the family. He does so with such humor and compassion, and you never quite forget that it’s him talking, but he never takes you out of the story. Cal himself builds up to his own life–he doesn’t become a major part of the action until the end–but you feel very much as if it’s him telling you a story the whole way through.

Desdemona and Lefty are fleshed out characters that live full lives, though their marriage is kind of sad and their stories are a bit tragic. I don’t know that either is exactly likable, but you feel like you know them and their struggles, especially Desdemona’s old world superstition and Lefty’s pull away from Desdemona and toward the excitements he remembers from youth.

Cal’s parents are less remarkable. Their courtship is, well, interesting. But neither character really seems developed. The mother is especially unmemorable, and if it weren’t for Milton’s notable racism, he wouldn’t stand out, either. The section that focuses on them is the lowlight of the book.

Highlights

The magic of this book is that it deals with so many issues at once without becoming lecture soup. I mean, gender identity, immigration, Greek culture, family dynamics, racism, religion, war, incest–it’s all covered. But none of it is sermonizing. It’s all just part of the story.

My favorite two parts were near the beginning, with Lefty and Desdemona growing up, and near the end, when Callie spends her days with who she calls “the object.” Both parts left me enraptured. The middle of the book is a little bloaty, but nothing that didn’t stop me from going straight for the next book. (I picked up the Virgin Suicides, which is so far wonderfully written but lacks the humor of Middlesex.)

Who Should Read the Book

This is hard. I want to say everyone will like it, but that’s probably naive of me. If you like coming-of-age stories or stories about families, this will probably tickle you. If you like feeling like someone you know is telling you a story when you read a book, this may be up your alley. But if you like fast-moving, action heavy plots, this isn’t probably your speed. It’s long and, at times, slow going.

You will probably know whether or not you like the book in the first few pages. The writing style is clearly established early on, and the type of characters you’ll meet are met quickly.

FWIW (My Opinion)

This was a very bright spot in my Pulitzer journey. I loved the whole experience of reading Middlesex. It’s pretty clear to me that this won the Pulitzer because of its treatment of social issues (being born different, issues of prejudice), it doesn’t hurt that the writing is fantastically entertaining and entirely pleasing.