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 mock-heroic family saga, though its narrator was also pluralised, a pseudo-hermaphrodite writing as an adult male about his Michigan girlhood and the path a mutated gene took through three generations before reaching him. These two books suggest an inventive writer committed to finding a new structure and voice for each story he tells. That such a writer would then publish a semi-autobiographical coming of age story, following three students of his own generation in the months before and the year after their graduation might not be surprising. But it is puzzling that he tells the story with such structural plainness, in a flat third person.

LRB 6 October 2011 | PDF Download