Where have you been, Jeffrey Eugenides?

Jeffrey Eugenides is, I would guess, a deliberate writer - very limited output over the years, everything he writes is thoughtful and imaginative and really good - Virgin Suicides was a landmark first novel, one of the few to try a first-person plural narrative and to do so successfully, others have tried since and the voice rings hollow. Middlesex was vast, strange, moving, unusual, deservedly and perhaps surprisingly, given its gender-unconventional protagonist, won a Pulitzer, but it did have the vast historical scope and a terrific account of an American urban landscape (Detroit) in time of chaos (70s race riots) - in short, his two novels are in some ways quite conventional and in other ways push boundaries of subject and style. Word in the current New Yorker is that he has a 3rd novel coming out in the fall - and the summer fiction issue contain a Eugenides "story," which I would guess is actually a section from the forthcoming novel - and it bodes well, the piece, Asleep in the Lord, is about an American living in Calcutta in the 1980s, volunteering at Mother Teresa's Home and wrestling, struggling, with issues of his faith: is he doing this work to serve Christ, or to meet some ego need, and are the two needs maybe one and the same? He feels guilty that his faith is not as strong as the faith of the other volunteers, and he finds them stiff, boring - yet he's also repulsed by the other travelers he meets, particularly by one guy who boasts of his sexual exploits in Bangkok. Lot of potential to develop this character and his moral uncertainties into a novel.