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A review by ridgewaygirl
Fresh Complaint by Jeffrey Eugenides
2.0
Usually in a collection of short stories by a single author there are a few duds; stories that you begin forgetting as soon as you've turned the last page. And there are a few that are fine and at least one that knocks your socks off and leave you light-headed. In a good collection, they'll be a few stories of the knock-out variety and in a great collection, there might be three or four. Fresh Complaint, Jeffrey Eugenides's collection of short stories falls short of even the first variety. Composed over several decades, the stories here are often stale, usually forgettable and in a few cases, misguided to an unsettling degree.
Eugenides is a great novelist, one who does amazing things when given the room to develop his characters and his story, but when restricted to a minimal length, he shows that he's not able to create characters that are anything other than one-note. His stories (with a single exception) center on white middle-aged men of the hapless variety. It's not a type that lacks for representation in American literature, but fine, Eugenides is writing-what-he-knows or something like that, but these sad sack men are written so carelessly as to make any sort of connection or sympathy for them impossible to achieve. I watched them flail and didn't care much one way or the other how things panned out.
There were things I did like. Eugenides writes well, and the stories that involved characters from The Marriage Plot and Middlesex had interest for me as someone who loved both those novels, although they brought nothing new to the table, it was at least interesting to see Eugenides develop his ideas. And the single story that wasn't about a middle-aged white dude had a little meat to it.
Were that it, this would be a lackluster, but fine collection by an author whose heart doesn't beat for brevity. But there were two stories that were much worse than they should have been. One, Capricious Gardens concerns a well-off middle-aged divorced man who picks up a hitch-hiking tourist, an attractive young woman, and offers her lodging at a house he occasionally lives in. Unfortunately, the attractive young woman has a traveling companion who is less attractive and who thwarts the guy's plans of conquest. The story appeared to be aiming for screw-ball comedy, and ended up feeling skeevy, with the middle-aged man's attempted seduction of a woman half his age. But this was written decades ago, and a pass of sorts might be given for a story written in the 80s. Inclusion in this book, however, is less excusable. And, finally, the newest story in the collection involved a teenage girl sexually preying on a much, much older and more powerful man. There was just so much wrong in this tale of a married man who innocently begins a sexual relationship with a teenager that it soured my view of the author.
Eugenides is a great novelist, one who does amazing things when given the room to develop his characters and his story, but when restricted to a minimal length, he shows that he's not able to create characters that are anything other than one-note. His stories (with a single exception) center on white middle-aged men of the hapless variety. It's not a type that lacks for representation in American literature, but fine, Eugenides is writing-what-he-knows or something like that, but these sad sack men are written so carelessly as to make any sort of connection or sympathy for them impossible to achieve. I watched them flail and didn't care much one way or the other how things panned out.
There were things I did like. Eugenides writes well, and the stories that involved characters from The Marriage Plot and Middlesex had interest for me as someone who loved both those novels, although they brought nothing new to the table, it was at least interesting to see Eugenides develop his ideas. And the single story that wasn't about a middle-aged white dude had a little meat to it.
Were that it, this would be a lackluster, but fine collection by an author whose heart doesn't beat for brevity. But there were two stories that were much worse than they should have been. One, Capricious Gardens concerns a well-off middle-aged divorced man who picks up a hitch-hiking tourist, an attractive young woman, and offers her lodging at a house he occasionally lives in. Unfortunately, the attractive young woman has a traveling companion who is less attractive and who thwarts the guy's plans of conquest. The story appeared to be aiming for screw-ball comedy, and ended up feeling skeevy, with the middle-aged man's attempted seduction of a woman half his age. But this was written decades ago, and a pass of sorts might be given for a story written in the 80s. Inclusion in this book, however, is less excusable. And, finally, the newest story in the collection involved a teenage girl sexually preying on a much, much older and more powerful man. There was just so much wrong in this tale of a married man who innocently begins a sexual relationship with a teenager that it soured my view of the author.