Middlesex and The Little Friend revisited
It's been almost a decade since the release of Jeffrey Eugenides' second novel, Middlesex. Let's revisit Wendy Cavenett's review of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel and Donna Tartt's much-anticipated follow-up to the unforgettable The Secret History.
The year is 2002...
Donna Tartt wears the dubious mantle of ‘the author of the best debut novel of the 1990s’. Jeffrey Eugenides’ first book was the international bestselling Gothic parable, The Virgin Suicides. Talk about a lot to live up to.
So here we are almost decade later and these feted authors have finally finished their second novels amidst speculation that all their early success (especially Tartt’s) had ruined their potentially great careers. Critics were having great fun periodically rehashing old stories about one book wonders Margaret Mitchell (Gone With The Wind) and Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird) when the pregnant pause from the Tartt – and in some cases, Eugenides – camp turned to a deafening silence. Quick ascendency then nothing. There must be something wrong, right? But we all know Tartt can’t write quickly – it took her eight years to write The Secret History, and aren’t we glad she took her time. As for Eugenides, he recently admitted that he was a happy captive to his second novel for nine years. What can you say to that?
So in the end, speculation gives way to two big American novels for those with big literary appetites: Tartt’s The Little Friend – a moody, psychological chiller – and Eugenides’ alluringly titled, Middlesex – an ingenious anthropological tale about the origins of an hermaphrodite. Both are sprawling, intergenerational tomes, and both leave you marvelling at the ingenuity with which the authors approach their subject matter; Tartt with her intense, uncanny eye for detail and circumstance, and Eugenides with prose that is buoyant, self-reflective, and jam-packed with imaginative visual sensations. But will The Little Friend and Middlesex live up to the expectations of the critics let alone the masses? Is that even possible?
Quick flashback. ‘Donna Tartt is going to be famous soon,’ wrote James Kaplan in a six-page Vanity Fair interview offered as a sweet precursor to the release in 1992 of her cult debut, The Secret History. But she hardly needed the highbrow leg-up. The reclusive Tartt became very famous. Almost rock star famous with an army of fans worldwide, and unprecedented international critical acclaim. Fireworks exploded, the world changed and Tartt became known as the debut novelist of the 1990s.
The fanfare was a little less spectacular for Eugenides, but the author of The Virgin Suicides nonetheless enjoyed international praise for his work that chronicled the lives of five doomed, teenage sisters in suburban America. Oblique, eerie and menacingly erotic, Eugenides’ novel, which was translated into 15 languages and sold half a million copies worldwide, spawned the equally disturbing Sofia Coppola-directed film (released in 1999) that rightfully engendered a new interest in his original work.
With Middlesex, the 42-year-old writer takes the life of an hermaphrodite and creates an enormous story that spans 80 years, two countries and three generations of Asia Minor Greek Americans. “I was born twice,” reads the book’s opening sentence, “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.”
Cal Stephanides (nee Calliope Helen Stephanides) is Eugenides’ 41-year-old narrator – gentle, big-hearted, possessor of a refreshingly wry sense of humour and, most importantly, the XY karyotype, a recessive mutation on his fifth chromosome that had laid dormant in his family for 250 years. Arising only in inbred populations, those born with this genetic mutation appear female at birth only to virilize at puberty. “Confronted with the impossible,” Cal observes, “there was no option but to treat it as conceivable.”
Conceivable also is Eugenides spending nine years researching and writing this enormous work that is one of the most intriguing novels I have read in years. Set against the tumultuous political (Nixon, Watergate, Kissinger, war), and racial (segregation, the ‘67 riots) backdrop of 20th century America (1920-1975), Middlesex is a work of incredible imaginative dexterity and important historical fact. It’s also an extraordinary coming-of-age story, a heartfelt exploration of cultural exile, race, and identity, and a tender, tragi-comedy about family relations, gender and death.
In prose of immaculate clarity, Eugenides renders the lives of the many characters that inhabit this work with exquisite insight, enabling his (mostly) omnipotent narrator the freedom to roam through time and place in an effort to discover his own identity. It is in the mysterious realms of adolescence, however, where Eugenides once again finds the exotic terrain in which to broach all manner of subjects, especially the contradictory elements of life that somehow remain indissolubly linked.
Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, the 12-year-old poker-faced star of Tartt’s The Little Friend, also knows about the contradictory elements of life. “All I’m saying,” says her Aunt Libby, “is that there are an awful lot of things in the world we don’t understand … and hidden connections between things that don’t seem to be related at all.”
Harriet has grown up in Alexandria, Mississippi, with the knowledge that Robin, her nine-year-old brother, was found hanging by the neck from a black tupelo tree (that still grows in her back garden) on Mothers Day when she was just a baby. Everybody knows it was murder, but there were never any suspects and everybody refuses talk about it. Instead, the mythology of Robin – who shines whiter than the most holy of angels – lingers stronger in Harriet’s life than the presence of her elusive sister Allison, and her parents who have unofficially separated. If it wasn’t for the family’s black maid and a few dedicated female relatives, Harriet wouldn’t have any emotional support base at all. As it is, she is left to do pretty much what she likes, roaming the neighbourhood and staying up late into the night believing it is her dead brother who is keeping her company when nobody else will. It’s just one of her many secrets. Another is her decision to find Robin’s murderer and “kill him” with the help of her best friend, Hely.
Trust Tartt to imagine such a story and then spend almost 10 years refining every sentence and nuance. But those subtle, hidden layers in Tartt’s narrative are what we’ve all craved for; the slow burn of suspense and terror, the psychological trauma her characters all suffer, and the hard-bitten realism that ultimately seeps through the finely-wrought mythology. If The Secret History was a prolonged study of guilt and intellectual pomposity, then The Little Friend is a startling exploration of a child’s mind corrupted by an adult’s world.
Interestingly, Tartt and Eugenides have both looked to the young to tell stories about human consciousness and the essentially subjective nature of experience. How we learn and what we learn at what age are central to both works and, in the case of Middlesex, the impact childhood and adolescence has had on the adult. But Eugenides, hitting his stride for more than 400 pages, suddenly opts for a rather vague rendering of Cal’s revelations regarding his sexuality. His is an all too easy – and convenient – resolution that sits uncomfortably with the rest of the work’s impeccable vision.
As for Tartt’s The Little Friend, it’s important to read the novel without the spectre of The Secret History obscuring what this new novel has to offer. After a gripping prologue that has enough suspense for an entire Hitchcock film, Tartt purposely slows the narrative pace, allowing the story to gradually expand and hover menacingly, slightly detached yet wonderfully hypnotic.
It has required a long and patient effort for Tartt and Eugenides to create this moment that not even they could have foreseen – the release of two great American novels in the final months of 2002, both hotly-anticipated and both well worth the wait. With so many visible signs of the tragedy of modern humanity, it is heartening when such fine literature can can tilt, ever so slightly, the axis towards hope.
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This review originally appeared in HQ magazine in 2002. Since that time, Eugenides has released his third novel, The Marriage Plot. Eugenides is scheduled to appear at the Sydney Writers' Festival, May 14-20, 2012. Please press here for more details.
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