Find Eugenides

I've been up and down on Jeffrey Eugenides, mostly up - really liked The Virgin Suicides when I read it many years ago and knew right away he was emerging as a major talent - and Middlesex more than made good on that promise, complex and funny and baffling – especially was moved by his account of living in the Detroit suburbs in the midst of the race riots of the ‘60s and also the account of his grandfather’s (?) escape from Greece during wartime. The two books were very different as well – one poetic and focused (used an unusual and successful 1^st-person plural narration)  and the other epic and naturalistic. A long wait for his next novel, and I was very disappointed by the drab Marriage Plot, which seemed devoid of a sense of time and place – a particular loss as I was hoping to read about Providence in the 1980s but this could have taken place anywhere. Glad to see a story from Eugenides in the current New Yorker, and to see that he’s working on a story collection. Find the Bad Guy is a very good piece and again shows the range of Eugenides’ abilities – the opening, a guy on his lawn spying on his kids and wife – who seems a bit abnormal, and we soon learn he’s got a restraining order against him – and then he in bits and pieces tells about his marriage, his infidelities and stupidity, and about all he’s missed and all he’s lost – a lot of find material in a well-paced narration. This is a not a typical Eugenides intellectual narrator (and it’s set in Texas, a new locale for him, too) – this is one of those first-person loser narrators, and I almost felt at times I was reading a piece by Saunders or TC Boyle – he’s that kind of clueless, limited character. Will be interesting to see, in the eventual Eugenides story collection, whether he has the same range in short fiction that he’s shown in his novels.