Paris for beginers: Eugenides perfectly captures a moment in time

The second part of Jeffrey Eugenides's "The Marriage Plot" is truly like a 2nd novel (though there are definite plot links between parts one and two): this section follows Mitchell, a half-Greek Brown-grad intellectual from working class Detroit, in other words someone probably having a lot in common with the author, as he begins eight postgrad months abroad with his college roommate, the wealthier,smoother, more sophisticated Larry - almost no mention of the link to part one, but Mitchell is deeply in love with the part one protagonist, Madeleine, who, also, is much more sophisticated and apparently attractive than he is. The difference, however, isn't just a shift in plot focus: this section of the novel is in an entirely different style. As noted in yesterday's post, part one was driven by lot points and dialogue, and Eugenides had no particular interest in evoking the milieu of Providence - the city just provided him with a database of proper nouns, street names and such, that he drew upon. Part 2 is different - Eugenides begins with a really terrific description of the streets of Paris, not a tourist-brochure kind of description but an evocation of the way Paris, Europe, seems to a young guy arriving, for the first time, after one of those crappy charter all-night flights. He perfectly gets the note of two guys traveling together, and of the tension and awkwardness that builds when one has a girlfriend in the city and the other doesn't - these triads are really important to Eugenides's fiction. To me, every note of this section, so far (p. 160 or so) rings true. I'm not sure where Eugenides is heading with this - I left off where Larry and girlfriend break up and the two guys are heading off, eventually to India - so whether the plot sprawls - getting farther and farther from the relations established up to this point and into new adventures, or whether he brings these forces back together and in some way unites Mitchell with Madeleine, or doesn't, we'll see further on. I do like this section very much though, and wonder if Eugenides could have opened the novel with the arrival in Paris? Whether he has stitched together what might have begun as two separate projects? Middlesex, also, united at least three very different types of material, if I remember correctly - and it makes me curious about how Eugenides works and about his sense of design: does he have an overall vision of the plot from the start? Or does he write separate pieces and figure out ways to unite them into a whole?