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Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker webpage (this story is available only for subscribers). Jeffrey Eugenides’s “Asleep in the Lord” was originally published in The New Yorker‘s June 13 & 20, 2011, issue.
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I was thrilled to see that this fiction issue featured a new piece by Jeffrey Eugenides, whose third novel, The Marriage Plot, comes out in October. For whatever reason, it took me a while to read. It’s a slowly-paced story, and I found myself putting it down to think quite often. I’m still not sure how I feel about it, but it has made an impression on me and I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit since I finished it.
The story takes place in 1983. A post-graduate named Mitchell has left his home in Michigan and, after travelling Europe for a while, has ended up in Calcutta, just beginning to serve at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying Destitutes. Nothing in his life has prepared him for his task.
Mitchell had never so much as changed a baby’s diaper before. He’d never nursed a sick person, or seen anyone die, and now here he was, surrounded by a mass of dying people, and it was his job to help them die at peace, knowing they were loved.
He takes it easy at first, offering head massages to those with headaches and passing out medication he knows nothing about, feeling he should work his way up to the larger tasks he finds repulsive, like bathing the sick. We note his hesitation early on, and we wonder if he’ll get over whatever barrier is keeping him from fully engaging in the service he’s signed up for.
For me, the best part of the story was the background on Mitchell’s own spiritual quest. He doesn’t seem to believe, only to want to; or, rather, he wants to be the kind of person he sees when he sees someone who believes (perhaps it’s even a bit of vanity). He was heavily influenced by William James, finding himself perfectly described in the passages about the infirm, and he finds particular promise in this line: “If there were such a thing as inspiration from a higher realm, it might well be that the neurotic temperament would furnish the chief condition of the requisite receptivity.” So he’s questing for such a signal.
Mitchell had embarked on his post-graduate travels in a state of exquisite receptivity. In Europe, he had found churches everywhere, spectacular cathedrals as well as quiet little chapels, all of them still functioning (though usually empty), each one open to a wandering pilgrim. He’d gone into these dark, superstitious spaces to starte at faded frescoes or crude, bloddy paintings of Christ. He’d peered into dusty reliquary jars containing the bones of St. Whoever. In stiff-backed pews, smelling candle wax, he’d closed his eyes and sat as still as possible, opening himself up to whatever was there that might be interested in him. Maybe there was nothing. But how would you ever know if you didn’t send out a signal? That was what Mitchell was doing: he was sending out a signal to the home office.
On the other hand, despite feeling giddy, “like a fan with a backstage pass,” when he finally catches a glimpse of Mother Teresa after he’s arisen pre-dawn to attend Mass, he still “didn’t feel as if he fit in with them, not matter how much he tried.”
I found the ending perplexing in the best of ways, though, as I said above, I’m still not entirely sure what I think of it. Looking forward to comments to help me out.
Before you read the book:
I recently posted a review on Eugenides’s first book, The Virgin Suicides, and in it I mentioned that I didn’t like his Pulitzer-winning Middlesex (2002). I have to admit, when it won the Pulitzer I was excited to read it. The crowd of people who loved it looked inviting and genuinely excited. But after reading it, I was disappointed and now have to cross to the other, lonely side of the street. Perhaps someone will help me see where I’ve missed the crux of the book, and then I’ll gladly jog across the street again.
The story is based on a fascinating premise:
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.
Here we meet Cal, formerly Calliope or Callie, Stephanides, who discovers that being a teenage girl is incredibly difficult – and then discovers he’s not really a girl at all. But the story doesn’t get there for quite a while. Like many good stories about identity, we must first go back to the forebears, Cal’s grandparents who, like Saleem Sinai’s in Midnight’s Children, seem to be on the fringe of many major historical events that combine to create the world in which Cal grows up. However, in this book, this trek through history, in the book to trace the path of the gene that ultimately makes Calliope Cal, while interesting in and of itself, felt disconnected from Cal’s story.
When I told my life story to Dr. Luce, the place where he invariably got interested was when I came to Clementine Stark. Luce didn’t care about criminally smitten grandparents or silkworm boxes or serenading clarinets. To a certain extent, I understand. I even agree.
I agree too. This quote comes from page 263 and is really where, to me, the story finally picked up and got into the subject the book promised – Cal’s life as a hermaphrodite, his coming to terms with his past and his identity, his unique perspective on the world coming from both a man and a woman.
While the first 263 pages were interesting and had some important developing points, I wish it were distilled, perhaps a few times over. Eugenides is a great, fluid writer – very witty. But he can get really wordy, and I didn’t see the need here. I admit that one of my favorite writers is the laconic Cormac McCarthy; I am often annoyed by what seems to me undue verbosity. This was a case where many elements that make up the length seemed superfluous and distracting. I know, I sound like – and probably am like - the ignorant Emperor telling Mozart he uses too many notes, cut out a few and it would be perfect. But strangely I felt like Eugenides told so much about his characters and yet they still felt underdeveloped. Often times the family history felt like one event after another without much time devoted to feeling what the character felt. We were simply told what the character felt.
In the end, though the story is compelling and undoubtedly interesting, I didn’t feel like it delivered. I see a lot of connections Eugenides makes about identity, but they didn’t seem fully developed. In fact, there were many symbols and motifs throughout the book that were very clever, and I expected a lot from them. But ultimately they seemed to be only that: clever, or rather, a device used to show cleverness and not to really further the plot or elaborate on a theme.
And that reminds me of another disclosure I must make. It’s an awful thing to go into a book expecting it to be something, but that’s what I did here. Over the last decade in literary criticism, gender/identity studies have increasingly looked at androgyny (which is close to, but not the same as hermaphroditism) and what it can say about perspective and gender. When a book called Middlesex won the Pulitzer, I unfortunately expected a nuanced, philosophical look at gender and America and identity. I didn’t feel like this was it.
Unfortunately, those expectations (my own fault) made me miss out on some of the other subtle aspects of the novel that shine through the history: the Smyrna uprising, immigration, Henry Ford’s ironic morality screening for his employees and the rise of Detroit, American optimism after World War II, the race riots in the 1960s and the decline of Detroit, the impressive connection between classicism and Cal’s Greek heritage.
Please don’t judge me too harshly for what is probably my own failure to comprehend. In fact, please leave comments that help me see what I’m missing. See, I still have faith that the book is great, that all those people on that side of the road are correct.
And, after all, I did enjoy this book. Though I treated it harshly above, I enjoyed the Forrest Gump-like trek through American history. There are really some fascinating episodes in this book that made me realize how ignorant I am or how much I’ve lacked the imagination to see what these events meant to people living at the time. Eugenides does an excellent job bringing these episodes to life. Sometimes, though, they felt like a series of episodes Sometimes I felt like he should have written an essay on American history rather than this novel.
I also enjoyed Eugenides’s sly, clever writing. I know that above I said that some things seemed to be there just to showcase the author’s wit, but some of that is forgiveable because he is really witty. I guess the best way to put this is that in Middlesex (but not The Virgin Suicides) Eugenides’s writing reminded me of Jim Carrey’s acting: at moments brilliant, hysterical, and spot on; but at other moments just too much, with a need to be toned down, better controlled.
After your read the book:
I feel a lot of pressure to love this book. I have the desire to love this book. Please help me out here.
Before you read the book:
I read Eugenides’s Middlesex a while ago and was surprised it had won the Pulitzer. Though Eugenides is an excellent writer of sentences, overall that book just didn’t do it for me. The story never came together, the tone never felt right, it felt like a knock-off of Midnight’s Children or Forest Gump, albeit with many clever twists and turn in both the writing and the story. Despite my unsatisfactory experience with Eugenides, I was attracted to The Virgin Suicides (1993). Okay, I admit it: I saw the movie and was intrigued but not satisfied. I hoped to have some questions answered, or at least discussed, in the book.
This is not the edition I read. Mine, though purchased years later, still suffers the curse of the movie poster edition – a curse at least for those like me who also like their books for their body.
Now, how to start a fairly positive review of The Virgin Suicides without sounding morbid . . .
Eugenides doesn’t hide what happens here. The title should give it away. If not, the book’s blurb will. And if that doesn’t, the first few pages should be enough. But that the Lisbon girls’ suicides happen is not the real purpose of this book. Telling the story from the first person plural, a group of middle-aged men who, when adolescents, were neighbors of the Lisbons during the “year of the suicides” have never been able to get over the deaths. In fact, they’ve been obsessed, collecting “exhibits” such as photos, shoes, retainers, anything they can get their hands on. Through the years they’ve interviewed everyone who can give them any details into the girls’ lives, including the poor parents. This book is their reflection, their report (though, don’t be frightened, it does not read at all like a report).
I do have a major gripe with this book (disclosed in the “after your read the book” section, and, strangely, one that actually made the book even more appealing in the end), but because I don’t want to spoil the book, in this “before you read the book section” I can really only say what I liked - I liked many things about The Virgin Suicides, in fact.
For one, Eugenides is an excellent stylist. His sentences weave in and out, he has a great sense of timing, and the atmosphere he creates is appropriately comical, muggy, and haunting. I enjoyed how he could be funny and ominous at the same time while describing this otherwise mundane suburban setting.
The sun was falling in the haze of distant factories, and in the adjoining slums the scatter of glass picked up the raw glow of the smoggy sunset.
Furthermore, the narrators’ reflections are superb and enlightening even when they are puerile, coming from the memories of adolescence. For example, in clever ways Eugenides shows how even our seemingly innocuous, nerdy narrators objectified the Lisbon girls:
Our amazement at being formally invited to a house we had only visited in our bathroom fantasies . . .
. . . five pairs of bronzed baby shoes preserved for all time the unstimulating stage of the Lisbon girls’ infancy.
And what makes this story even more unique is the fact that these very boys are the ones attempting to explain why adolescent girls would commit suicide. All of their attempts to comprehend these girls belie their underlying obsession which is a direct offshoot of the attraction these girls held in life.
No, despite my gripe, I was not disappointed by the book. In some ways it felt like it was relying a bit too much on Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” – first person plural, decaying house, putrid smell, hidden lives, naïve community – to create its motifs, but this is minor because Eugenides really makes it his own.
After you read the book:
Now for my major gripe (which my wife helped me turn into something that made the book more interesting). Eugenides alludes to the conclusion that the suicides cannot be explained. All the typical theories – abuse, loneliness, teenage angst, revenge - don’t hold water according to the “we” telling the story and it definitely felt that Eugenides wanted the reader to feel the same. And I wanted to believe it. I wanted to feel like there was more to the suicides. I didn’t come away with that though. I never felt that Eugenides succeeded in presenting any nuances that led me to feel like there was more to the story. It’s not that I wanted an answer - most of the best books don’t have an answer – but I at least wanted some evidence of why there is a question or mystery. Just because Eugenides says there is more to this, and his characters back him up by saying the same thing, did not convince me.
I just never had reason to believe that the totality of the factors leading up to the suicides wasn’t their cause. I don’t think the remaining daughters would have killed themselves but for Cecilia’s suicide and the subsequent grief and lock-down. And even after that, I don’t think they would have committed suicide but for the general objectification by the boys who refused to get to know them and the even harsher lock-down in the steadily decaying house. Adding those factors together I can understand their suicides. They were not individuals. They were even punished as a whole. I’m not sure why – other than because I was told – I’m supposed to think that there was something else, something deeper, something more mysterious, more to the source. As I said earlier, I don’t need the answer to the mystery. I just need the foundation for believing there’s a mystery to begin with.
Then again, this might just be more clever than I first thought. Indeed, this disconnect between what is averred and what is really there – that absence of mystery - might be part of the point. Perhaps the boys’ attempts to find another cause that does not exist is also their attempt to feel less guilty for their fascination with the girls’ deaths and to take away their indirect complicity in the suicides. This is plausible because throughout the book death is another spectacle, another source of intrigue that titillates the boys more than saddens them.
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