:00:07. > :00:17.Darren and the landowner. BBC News now says it's time for Talking
:00:17. > :00:24.
:00:24. > :00:28.is the American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. He's only written three
:00:28. > :00:33.novels, but so startling was his debut of The Virgin Suicides in
:00:33. > :00:40.1993 that everything he has written since has been eagerly anticipated.
:00:41. > :00:44.In 2003 he ran the Pulitzer Prize for Middlesex, and his third novel
:00:44. > :00:49.The Marriage Plot is difficult to cat gorise. We met in a London
:00:49. > :00:58.hotel and he told me why his writing takes him in so many
:00:58. > :01:02.different directions. Jeffrey Eugenides, welcome to Talking Books.
:01:02. > :01:07.Thank you. I want to start with your latest novel, The Marriage
:01:07. > :01:13.Plot, which seems on the surface to be the most conventional of your
:01:13. > :01:22.novels. The Virgin Suicides, about five girls committing suicide, from
:01:22. > :01:27.the same family, middlesex about a family. Do you feel that you have,
:01:27. > :01:32.over the three novels mellowed as a writer? I think if you look at my
:01:32. > :01:35.first two novels, it will be easy to have the new one seem
:01:35. > :01:40.conventional by comparison. What I was concerned with with the book
:01:40. > :01:44.was goinging a deeply as I could into the characters. Each book
:01:44. > :01:50.teaches you certain things. You gain anability to write in a
:01:50. > :01:54.certain way. Middlesex I created full-blooded characters. When I
:01:54. > :01:58.finished that book I knew I wanted to proceed in that direction. That
:01:58. > :02:05.was the directive I gave myself, to write a dramaticised book about two
:02:05. > :02:11.or three figures, and to map out their consciousness, but stay close
:02:11. > :02:17.to the mental processes and emotions and have a character
:02:17. > :02:23.driven novel. Middlesex was plot driven. Narratives were looping
:02:23. > :02:28.around, interconnecting. This has a gentle art. There's lots of
:02:28. > :02:33.surprises and violations. I tried to have a light hand through the
:02:33. > :02:39.process. Essentially it's a story, a love triangle. The central
:02:39. > :02:43.character is a woman set in the 1980s, in the east coast college,
:02:43. > :02:49.they are Liberal arts graduates and it's a year after they have
:02:49. > :02:53.graduated. You go back to their time at college. Because of the
:02:53. > :02:56.academic backdrop I wondered whether - it seems the clash
:02:56. > :03:00.between post modernism and traditionalism is a subject in the
:03:01. > :03:03.novel. Whether you wrote the novel thinking, "I want this to be a
:03:03. > :03:09.corrective to all the experimentational novels", that's
:03:09. > :03:13.what I'm interested in, the socialist realist novel. I am
:03:13. > :03:18.interested in the socialist realist novel. I'm interested in trying to
:03:18. > :03:22.do something new. I found the way to do that is combine traditional
:03:22. > :03:26.elements of the novel with post- modern elements. You can read the
:03:26. > :03:32.story as a traditional red-blooded love story about young people. You
:03:32. > :03:35.can read it as a deconstruction of the traditional marriage plot from
:03:35. > :03:41.Austin, if you are academically inclined. You don't have to think
:03:41. > :03:44.of it that way. I played with both ideas. In general I wanted to seize
:03:44. > :03:52.the reader's attention and give them an experience akin to those
:03:52. > :03:57.that I encountered in reading Toll store and great writers, where you
:03:57. > :04:03.em-- Toll star, where you empathise with the characters. That's what I
:04:03. > :04:10.was thinking about. Does it matter which way the reader reacts to it?
:04:10. > :04:18.There's a sense in this modle and in Middlesex, you have to know a
:04:18. > :04:24.lot. Whether it's about hermaphroditSm, Or in the marriage
:04:24. > :04:29.plot about post-modernism, or whether you need to know about a
:04:29. > :04:36.lot. Do you expect readers to know or do you want to educate them?
:04:36. > :04:40.don't think you need to know the references in my books. You
:04:40. > :04:44.understand that I quote a theoretical writer, the thorny bits.
:04:44. > :04:51.It's always explained in the context. You could read it having
:04:51. > :04:55.not taken any symiotics. You may enjoy the book if you are an
:04:56. > :05:02.English major, but you don't need to. The names are the furniture of
:05:02. > :05:07.the novel. I never want a book to be research-heavy or a formal
:05:07. > :05:13.exercise. It's fine if people pick up things along the way. How hard
:05:13. > :05:17.is that. Clearly you have to do the research and try to wear it lightly.
:05:17. > :05:21.You need to do more research than you use. And that you can feel when
:05:21. > :05:27.I write the scenes, when it's too heavy. If you put in information
:05:27. > :05:34.because it's a great bit of information, but it's not
:05:34. > :05:41.functioning narratively, I cut it out. With Middlesex there's rams of
:05:41. > :05:50.notes that did not make its -- reams of notes that did not make
:05:50. > :05:54.its way into the title. Marriage in the 19th century novel mattered and
:05:54. > :05:58.social equality and divorce killed the novel since that time, is that
:05:58. > :06:07.something that concerns you, that you as a novelist, that you want to
:06:07. > :06:10.make the novel important in social culture? Well, I was The argument
:06:10. > :06:16.that the novel is dead, because marriage no longer means what it's
:06:16. > :06:19.used tox There's a reason I put the -- used to. There's a reason I put
:06:19. > :06:24.the argument in the mouth of a professor. These are thought I had,
:06:24. > :06:28.toyed with. I don't believe them. I began with modernism. I never felt
:06:29. > :06:34.the novel depended on older structures from Austin or James.
:06:34. > :06:39.That was one of the tastiest plots that the novel came across, the
:06:39. > :06:46.marriage plot. And I did lament the fact that a contemporary novelist
:06:46. > :06:51.was no longer able to treat the plot. I wanted to she was there a
:06:51. > :06:56.way for a contemporary novelist to grab energies of the marriage plot
:06:56. > :07:00.but write a contemporary novel where none of the same principles,
:07:00. > :07:06.outcomes would occur. That's what I thought about. I wasn't worried
:07:06. > :07:14.whether the novel mattered, I feel like it does. Let's talk about
:07:14. > :07:19.whether this issue of the novel being relevant or not is important.
:07:19. > :07:25.Are seen as a generation of writers -- writers are seen as a generation
:07:25. > :07:29.of wrirs where this is an issue, whereas you say it doesn't seem as
:07:29. > :07:35.much. I think you are right, I and others, are of a generation where
:07:35. > :07:40.we want the novel to matter. We think it can convey meaning and
:07:40. > :07:46.represent the world. How will we do that? We don't want to write novels
:07:46. > :07:51.that are academic exercises and of interest to other creative writing
:07:51. > :07:57.professors. We want to reflect our experience and are moving away from
:07:57. > :08:03.the ironic posture of high-post modernism, where everything was a
:08:03. > :08:10.slight comment on the inability to convey meaning or the falsity of
:08:10. > :08:17.social conditions, social interaction. We want to go back and
:08:17. > :08:22.tell stories again. In doing so, we don't think we are necessarily
:08:22. > :08:29.being retroyaid. I would agree with that, -- retrograde. I would agree
:08:29. > :08:32.with that, but many writers have done that all along. There was a
:08:32. > :08:38.tradition, maybe not an undercurrent, of people that have
:08:38. > :08:43.told stories about America in a way where readers can find their own
:08:43. > :08:47.lives depicted and reflected. I think we are coming at the end of
:08:47. > :08:54.that. But I'm not sure that it's so different than many things going on
:08:54. > :08:59.in the '40s, '50s, and '60s in the United States. Why choose the 1980s
:08:59. > :09:06.to set the novel? It's clearly a pre-9/11. The world has changed so
:09:06. > :09:12.much in the last decade. Why did you choose the 1980s. I guess I'm
:09:12. > :09:20.pre9/11 in my heart. I chose the '80s... In terms of what, you are
:09:20. > :09:24.an innocent. I'm an in the. I live in my memory. My books had a
:09:24. > :09:34.nostalgic quality. I chose the '80s for a simple reason. I went to
:09:34. > :09:35.
:09:35. > :09:40.college in the '80s. This book connected with semiotics, it's in
:09:40. > :09:43.the '80s. I wanted to be accurate about the times at college that my
:09:43. > :09:47.characters were living in, that's when I went to college. I remember
:09:47. > :09:54.the music, what it was like, the intellectual debates that were
:09:54. > :09:58.going on. I wanted to set it there. I feel that this book is completely
:09:58. > :10:02.contemporary. It's contemporary in the main. When I read from this
:10:02. > :10:08.book, at a college campus, the students respond as though it's
:10:08. > :10:14.happening - their lives are the same now, emotionally, in terms of
:10:14. > :10:22.their romantic lives. Even the whole backdrop of intellectualising
:10:22. > :10:28.all kinds of things? They read the writers. I get e-mails from people
:10:28. > :10:32.graduating. Boyfriends are as bad now as in the 1980s, so it hasn't
:10:32. > :10:38.changed. Cell phones, Internet and different ways of communicating,
:10:38. > :10:44.but in the main the stuff I'm writing about in this book are
:10:44. > :10:50.eternal questions. I didn't think setting in the '80s unnecessarily
:10:50. > :10:56.made it historical or passe. heard you quoted that autobiography
:10:57. > :11:01.is art and when you use it, you a have a pare and find the fiction
:11:01. > :11:09.outside of the autobiography. There are big autobiographical elements
:11:09. > :11:13.in your work, or do you reject that idea. No, there certainly are.
:11:14. > :11:19.Autoio biographical writing is dangerous -- autobiographical
:11:19. > :11:22.writing is dangerous, because you represent totality of your life.
:11:22. > :11:31.The section of The Marriage Plot which dovetails to my life is when
:11:31. > :11:36.Mitchell goes to India and volunteers with with Mother Theresa,
:11:36. > :11:39.which I did. I wrote that section. It's 40 pages in the novel. I
:11:39. > :11:43.described everything I saw. Every person I met was described,
:11:43. > :11:47.everything I ate, everything that I could remember. It was an
:11:47. > :11:52.overwhelming experience for me. When I read it back, there was no
:11:52. > :11:55.shape to it. It needed to function in a novel dramatically, that
:11:55. > :11:58.section. It didn't need to be representative of my life. It
:11:58. > :12:02.needed to be representative of Mitchell's transit through the book.
:12:02. > :12:07.I had to cut out almost everything in order to get it to work. It was
:12:07. > :12:11.the most difficult part of the novel. Whereas the section about
:12:11. > :12:15.Leonard and his mental illness, something I have not experienced, I
:12:15. > :12:25.wrote quickly, because I could see what needed to be there. I didn't
:12:25. > :12:29.
:12:29. > :12:32.have to compete against my memories Part of the portrait of Leonard has
:12:32. > :12:37.been interpreted by many critics as being a partial portrait of David
:12:37. > :12:40.Foster Wallace. Is that accurate? It is not correct at all. I could
:12:40. > :12:48.list a number of differences between Bernard and David Foster
:12:48. > :12:52.Wallace. I began this novel in the late 90s before I had even met
:12:52. > :12:57.David Foster Wallace. When I write a character, I think, what kind of
:12:57. > :13:01.person is this? Then I think of all the people who might resemble that
:13:01. > :13:06.person and take details from a host of real-life characters and then I
:13:06. > :13:09.poured a huge amount of myself into the character. My own actions,
:13:09. > :13:14.memories, thoughts about things. You play around with all these
:13:14. > :13:18.different elements until finally you have a character that diverges
:13:18. > :13:25.from everyone you know and becomes his own person. I think when it
:13:25. > :13:28.does. All of that speculation began on a blog from New York magazine
:13:28. > :13:34.that was based on the fact that both of these characters wore
:13:34. > :13:40.bandanas. I pointed out that my bandana comes from Axel Rose Room
:13:40. > :13:45.Guns N' Roses. Learned is very interested in heavy metal. -- or
:13:45. > :13:49.Leonard. They ran wild with the bandana idea. Not that people are
:13:49. > :13:56.reading the book and seen him as a character, I hope that is dying
:13:56. > :14:02.down. Is it to do with the fact that there is a group of writers,
:14:02. > :14:07.including yourself and David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, who
:14:07. > :14:16.were writing a roundabout the same time and there is a sense that what
:14:16. > :14:22.you had similar concerns and there was a kind of rivalry, sharing
:14:22. > :14:27.their ambitions? Is that partly what makes people say... When it is
:14:27. > :14:33.based on Jonathan Franzen. I will tell you for the first time here. I
:14:33. > :14:39.just disguise to be the bandana so no-one would realise. There is a
:14:39. > :14:43.review that said that Madeleine is Jonathan Franzen! All of my
:14:43. > :14:48.characters are Jonathan Franzen! I can't get enough of him! I think it
:14:48. > :14:53.is true, because they are lumping us to get banned writing an article,
:14:53. > :15:00.the author of the article is a very good writer. I enjoy talking to him,
:15:00. > :15:03.but the truth is that we did not know each other. We were really
:15:03. > :15:08.young and starting out. I had other writer friends there were very
:15:08. > :15:13.helpful to me early on. The article in New York magazine was called
:15:13. > :15:19.Just Kids. I think that is because we met each other when we were in
:15:19. > :15:23.our 20s. The truth is I met Jonathan Franzen when I was 34. We
:15:23. > :15:27.had many discussions about the novel. He was writing The
:15:27. > :15:35.Corrections then and I was writing Middlesex. I do not think it was
:15:35. > :15:40.true to say we were all competing in some kind of small hot house
:15:41. > :15:48.together. We may have competed with each other and netted each other by
:15:48. > :15:52.reading each other before we ever met. Boasters what an hour about
:15:52. > :15:59.David Foster Wallace I learnt from reading his novels. Not from any
:15:59. > :16:05.discussions. But writers are put together and are together in some
:16:05. > :16:12.way. So finally they wrote an article and acted as if we were
:16:12. > :16:15.always hanging out and discussing things. But David Foster Wallace
:16:15. > :16:22.beaches in Jonathan Franzen's writing. Could you talk about his
:16:22. > :16:28.influence? Can you say a bit about his influence on your generation of
:16:28. > :16:37.writers? When you read David Foster Wallace the first time, what you
:16:37. > :16:40.are whereof is someone who captured the sound of his time, the sound of
:16:40. > :16:48.our generation better than anyone. Every now and then that happens.
:16:48. > :16:52.You read a writer and that is exactly how people think and sound.
:16:52. > :16:58.Mrs Our World represented. It seems so fresh and excited many come
:16:58. > :17:03.across that. That is what I think was his great power and why
:17:03. > :17:13.everyone admired his work so much. They were very close, Wallace and
:17:13. > :17:14.
:17:14. > :17:22.friends in. -- Jonathan Franzen. One of the things that are clearly
:17:22. > :17:26.interested Wallace was being a seeker of truth. I would like to
:17:26. > :17:33.ask you about the centrality of religion and the pursuit of the
:17:33. > :17:39.fate. Mitchell is clearly somebody who, he is a divinity student, he
:17:39. > :17:45.is engaged with that, but is it a fundamental data. What made you
:17:45. > :17:50.want to place that as a central theme? The The Marriage Plot
:17:50. > :17:54.references many traditional novelistic themes. One thing I find
:17:55. > :18:00.curiously absent from contemporary novels his religion. The search for
:18:00. > :18:04.truth. People have not stopped asking themselves this question.
:18:04. > :18:09.How should I move? What does it mean to be a good person? Is a
:18:09. > :18:16.meaning to existence or is it meaningless? I wanted to bring that
:18:16. > :18:23.back to my novel. Wallace was interested in that also. That gives
:18:23. > :18:26.our generation, the novels about generation, it marks the difference
:18:27. > :18:32.between them and the writers who came before because I think we are
:18:32. > :18:36.trying to find out what trick is and saying that maybe there is a
:18:36. > :18:43.truth or Dare is the possibility of describing a partial truth in the
:18:43. > :18:53.novels. That goes against the reader and others -- director and
:18:53. > :18:55.
:18:55. > :19:01.others. -- Derrida. There is an absence in contemporary novels
:19:01. > :19:07.given how large religion looms in contemporary society. If you are in
:19:07. > :19:10.the US, you can't be -- help but be aware of religion. Usually in a
:19:10. > :19:14.form that is slightly scary. With Mitchell, the difficulty was
:19:14. > :19:19.writing about a character who is sincere in his religious
:19:19. > :19:23.inclinations but also full of doubt and scepticism. I did not want to
:19:23. > :19:29.make him a figure of fun. Just a college kid who goes to India to
:19:29. > :19:35.find himself. I wanted to be gracious to him and tender about
:19:35. > :19:38.these feelings he has and yet, I also knew he is intelligent and
:19:38. > :19:43.does not accept many of the doctrines he is being asked to
:19:43. > :19:48.believe. It is a fine wine to walk and it gave me a lot of difficulty
:19:48. > :19:53.to write. There is a sense that you could argue that all three of your
:19:53. > :19:58.novels are coming-of-age novels. In the Virgin Suicides, although the
:19:59. > :20:05.list -- was then sisters all kill themselves, there is a -- an
:20:05. > :20:10.undercurrent of reluctance to enter into the adult world. Middlesex is
:20:10. > :20:13.about being on the cost of being a teenager. With the The Marriage
:20:13. > :20:22.Plot, the three characters are trying to navigate their way
:20:22. > :20:27.through the world as adults. All three novels are about being on the
:20:27. > :20:30.cusp of being an adult. It seems to be what I have done. You could
:20:30. > :20:38.describe The Marriage Plot as a coming-of-age novel if you agree
:20:38. > :20:43.that they do all, they each. These figures are fully adult when
:20:43. > :20:48.describing the things they are thinking and examining their lives.
:20:48. > :20:52.I thought I could be intelligent as possible in their approach to
:20:52. > :20:58.recreate their thoughts. I was not writing about people who did not
:20:58. > :21:02.have a deep self understanding. They do. Yet, they are young and
:21:02. > :21:07.confused and passionate. I have always enjoyed writing about
:21:07. > :21:11.characters like that. Young people are trying to pick him out today
:21:11. > :21:15.are and are often putting on different cells to see if they fit.
:21:15. > :21:20.You are writing about a character who is writing himself or herself,
:21:20. > :21:25.trying to create themselves. That is very rich material for a
:21:25. > :21:34.novelist. You never know what they're going to do. Mitchell goes
:21:34. > :21:41.off on his religious search. Leonard becomes very different then
:21:41. > :21:51.he might be otherwise.Writing about characters who are changing and
:21:51. > :21:51.
:21:51. > :21:54.perhaps growing. Mutating. These characters are not static. I have
:21:54. > :22:02.found in my three novels writing about young people to be conducive
:22:02. > :22:07.to dramatic treatment. So insular debut with the Virgin Suicides, you
:22:07. > :22:12.have written two other and novels. Do you feel you have come of age as
:22:12. > :22:20.a novelist? Do you feel at ease as a writer? I think I'm getting the
:22:20. > :22:25.hang of it. I am getting a sense that I can do it again. Don DeLillo
:22:25. > :22:29.once told me, your first book comes to is a gift. You don't know how to
:22:29. > :22:35.rotate. The second book is the book that teaches you you can actually
:22:35. > :22:45.do it. I agree with that but after the third, I feel more so. I am not
:22:45. > :22:51.the kind of novelist he will always repeat the same novel. I do feel a
:22:51. > :22:56.kind of anxiety on the level of the sentence for the first 20 years of
:22:56. > :23:00.my writing career. I did not know how I wanted my books to sound. I
:23:00. > :23:05.did not know if I could actually get my point across. That started