James Purdon
Unideal Husband
Jeffrey Eugenides is a writer who takes his time – a decade-between-novels sort of writer. And the investment of time has paid dividends. Between his eerily brilliant debut, The Virgin Suicides (1993), and the baggier Middlesex (2002) his books have sold more than three million copies. After Middlesex, one had a sense of an author developing his own line in high-concept fiction, not quite magical (or hysterical) realism, but something slightly at an angle to those modes, a kind of plausible expressionism. The death-driven Lisbon sisters of the first novel and Cal, the intersex narrator of the second, were unusual figures around whom the fabric of everyday life in mid-twentieth-century America could be distorted to reveal its underlying strangeness. What was most troubling about the suicidal girls was their normality; what was most interesting about Cal was the way the uncertainty of her (and later his) gender revealed the queerness of certainty itself.
The Marriage Plot is an odd successor to those two books. It begins, straightforwardly, as a campus novel. We meet Madeleine Hanna in the early 1980s on the morning of her graduation from Brown University.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Humanity is inextricably bound up with the seas and oceans, which were used for communication and trade but also for war and the determined exploitation of peoples and resources.'
@margarettelinc1 on a global history of the seas and oceans.
http://ow.ly/CL8850xqzLH
'There is a chilling moment as he describes a gun hovering over him as its holder tries to make up his mind as to whether Lançon is dead or alive.'
Andrew Hussey reviews Philippe Lançon's extraordinary first-hand account of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
http://ow.ly/3M8E50xqqrE
Tales from the New Bedlam: my piece on Tim Etchells' ENDLAND in the current Literary Review https://literaryreview.co.uk/tales-from-the-new-bedlam via @Lit_Review There's a paywall but the first bit's free . . .