On of our best writers but you tend to forget about him: Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides is definitely one of our best writers, but you tend to forget about him because he (apparently) works pretty slowly (only two books that I know of over about 20-year span), with few if any short stories along the way, other than what turn out to be excerpts from the novel in progress - and he also stays out of the limelight, such as it is for serious writers. I think he may even live abroad, not sure. Anyway, good to see his very strong story, Complete Solitude, in the current New Yorker - this one, also, no doubt, a novel excerpt as, for all its strengths, it doesn't have the true "arc" of a story - just ending with a moment rather than an insight or resolution. Story is one of the 65 billion stories about young love, but it's amazing the variations on the theme - this one about a rather repressed girl at Brown ca 1980 (when Eugenides was there, I think) and her first deeply sexual relation, with a guy, fellow student in a semiotics seminar (some good if too easy digs at the academic pretensions of the 80s, and now as well for that matter), who's too wrapped up in himself and can't really accept the love that she tries to offer him - or maybe he's "just not into" her. Eugenides does great job describing the life of the times in a college environ, especially the guy's ragged apartment with the never-washed sheets and the futon on the dusty floor. He creates a vivid sketch of two characters, especially the lonely woman - a thousand times more vivid and credible, in just these few pages, than the similar character that Laurie Moore tried to create in her funny but over-praised Gate on the Stairs. Looking forward to the (eventual) novel.