Jeffrey Eugenides

P>Sitting with Jeffrey Eugenides, author of "The Virgin Suicides" and now "Middlesex," in a restaurant recently, I'm on red alert for flinches and squirms.

It's not that he won't answer questions.He's too well-bred to be even the teensiest bit hostile.

It's just that, well, maybe it takes a writer as fine as Eugenides to realize how lethal the right (or wrong) words can be.So he's a little reluctant to let the wrong words go into something as uncontrolled as a newspaper interview.

For instance, there's the matter of his 4-year-old daughter's name.Eugenides gives it quickly, then starts and slams the brain shutters closed but not before I catch the panic flitting through his eyes.

Personal questions incoming!

Oh, I haven't the heart.For the sake of preserving Eugenides' peace of mind, we'll keep her name out of this.

Suffice to say there will be no hyphenation with his artist wife's last name, which happens to be Yamauchi.
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Eugenides is a modern man, true, but with an almost Old World education.He was born in Detroit and grew up in Grosse Pointe Park, the youngest son of the executive vice president at Michigan Mortgage Corp. (this divulged with near resignation into his Heineken), and attended University Liggett School in Grosse Pointe Woods starting in seventh grade.

At Liggett, Eugenides studied Latin and learned about Tiresias, the mythic seer who had been both a man and a woman and so was asked by Hera and Zeus to referee their argument on whether men or women enjoyed the act of love more. (Zeus said women did, and Tiresias agreed.)

"This is very interesting stuff to the young Latin scholar," Eugenides says.

That scholar filed the story away, where it formed part of the inspiration for "Middlesex," the sprawling, hilarious and tender story of Calliope Stephanides, a Detroit- and Grosse Pointe-reared girl of the 1960s and '70s who grows up to find out she's a boy.

From Liggett Eugenides went to Brown University, a prestigious school at any time but a particularly fabulous one to attend in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when such future literary lights as novelists Rick Moody and Donald Antrim were students and friends of Eugenides.
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"I was the warden, and I interrogated Kennedy, who played a character called Longshoe," Eugenides says.
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Eugenides made a splash with his first novel, "The Virgin Suicides," in 1993.That was set in Grosse Pointe and narrated by an unnamed group of teenage boys who believed themselves to be in tragic love with the five Lisbon sisters.

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Eugenides says the germ for "Middlesex" was the journal of a 19th-Century French hermaphrodite and her crush on one of her convent school classmates.Ah, what material!Medical mystery!Haunted life!Doomed passion!

The former Latin scholar's interest was piqued, but the writing was no better than you can hope for from a 19th-Century convent schoolgirl .

"She wasn't able to tell you what you really wanted to know," Eugenides says."The first impulse of 'Middlesex' was that I wanted to write the story that wasn't there."

The book grew and grew.Detroit got into it, even though it's been decades since any of the Eugenides family lived here (his immigrant Greek grandfather did own a bar and grill in the city, as does one of the characters in "Middlesex").His Greek ancestry got into it, even though his family is pretty much as assimilated as it's possible to be.His prep school got into it, though Eugenides cautions that the prep school Callie attends isn't Liggett but a bit of Liggett, a bit of Grosse Pointe Academy and a bit of novelistic invention.
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Eugenides will have to settle for a fistful of adoring reviews.

Nomadic novelist

Eugenides finishes out his book tour with three readings in metro Detroit starting Monday.Then it's back to western Berlin, where Eugenides and his family have been living for several years on a cultural exchange grant.Their visas last a few more months.Then they'll figure out whether to apply for another or to move.

Eugenides is thinking Chicago, maybe.Or New York, though he and his wife ended up in Berlin partly because their Brooklyn apartment wouldn't allow children.

Detroit?Grosse Pointe?

"I could imagine coming back to Detroit, but I'm not sure my wife wants to," Eugenides says."She's a Californian, and it's really hard to get Californians to move to Detroit."

Reach MARTA SALIJ at 313-223-4530 or salij@freepress.com

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