The Mookse and the Gripes

Click here to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker webpage.

Click for a larger image.

Though I didn’t particularly like Middlesex, it stays with me — and I loved and still love The Virgin Suicides.  All of this makes Eugenides an author I am on the look-out for.   I was thrilled while reading his first lengthy paragraph, which had a lot of what I liked about Middlesex, with its breathless speed and quirky detail:

It was debatable whether or not Madeleine had fallen in love with Leonard the first moment she’d seen him.  She hadn’t even known him then, and so what she’d felt was only sexual attraction, not love.  Even after they’d gone out for coffee, she couldn’t say that what she was feeling was anything more than infatuation.  But ever since the night they went back to Leonard’s place after watching “Amarcord” and started fooling around, when Madeleine found that instead of being turned off by physical stuff, as she often was with boys, instead of putting up with that or trying to overlook it, she’d spend the entire night worrying that she was turning Leonard off, worrying that her body wasn’t good enough, or that her breath was bad from the Caesar salad she’d unwisely ordered at dinner; worrying, too, about having suggested they order Martinis because of the way Leonard had sarcastically said, “Sure.  Martinis.  Let’s pretend we’re Salinger characters”; after having had, as a consequence of this anxiety, pretty much no sexual pleasure, despite the perfectly respectable session they’d put together, and after Leonard (like every guy) had immediately fallen asleep, leaving her to lie awake stroking his head and vaguely hoping she wouldn’t get a yeast infection, Madeleine asked herself if the fact that she’d just spend the whole night worrying wasn’t, in fact, a surefire sign that she was falling in love.

The story then takes us back a bit.  When Madeleine falls in love with Leonard, she is a senior in college.  Her first few years, wittily summarized, were fun but unromantic.  She is an English major who became one because she loves to read.  Then she signed up for a Semiotics class:

Almost overnight it became laughable to read writers like Cheever or Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about anally deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France. 

In Semiotics everyone “was so spectral-looking that Madeleine’s natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan.”  But into the room walked someone who else who seemed normal, someone who, when introducing himself didn’t comment on how his name meant nothing but rather said “that his parents had named him Leonard, that it had always seemed pretty handy to have a name, especially when you were being called to dinner, and that if anyone wanted to call him Leonard he would answer to it.”

Over the next few pages, we watch as Madeleine and Leonard become closer together until a moment when semiotics began making sense to Madeleine, while she is reading Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which is “extreme solitude.”  Eugenides continues the playfulness even while we watch Madeleine’s suffering for love mimic some of what she’s learning.  It’s not that simple; Eugenides pays off here. 

Is this a piece of the novel he’s working on?