As the 21st century got underway, I was baffled that all of the published contemporary novelists and many of its poets I admired were in place by the time I graduated from college at the beginning of the ‘70s. Where were those my own age or younger?
Yes, the publishing world was in turmoil, but that couldn’t have been the entire problem.
I was also recognizing that my native Midwest, especially as I experienced it in industrial Ohio, went unrepresented – something missing largely from Hollywood presentations as well.
And then, as I discovered Greek-American culture, I was amazed to find how little of that culture, too, existed in public awareness.
The one exception who came to light was Detroit-born Eugenides. And how!
His three novels, each one a unique take on the novel itself, address the previous blanks. For large stretches of the Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, I thought he was talking about Dayton, including the race riots of ’68. The Marriage Plot, meanwhile, looked at Quaker practice in ways that gave me confidence in the Greek-American dimension of my own novel What’s Left.
The man is a master, for sure.
Jnana's Red Barn 