Out with a Bang

My glut of author discussions has, alas, drawn to a close (for now), but it ended with a pretty phenomenal bang.  Two Pulitzer Prize-winning authors, Jennifer Egan and Jeffrey Eugenides, graced the stage of the 92^nd Street Y this week for a joint reading, and it was fantastic.

After a witty introduced by a professor from Columbia’s English department, Egan strolled onto the stage in black, flat-heeled boots and a colorful skirt topped with a purple blouse and white cardigan.  She looked like someone I’d spot tossing yogurt into a shopping cart at the grocery store.  Despite her casual appearance, she said that being at the 92^nd Street Y was pretty significant for her.  “I feel like I’ve made it to Carnegie Hall,” she said.  I had just read her Visit from the Goon Squad two weeks before, and so the first chapter, which she read aloud, was fresh in my mind.  Still, I did not find it at all repetitive because Egan prefaced the chapter by explaining her inspiration for it, and therefore the whole book.  The chapter is about a woman named Sasha who is a kleptomaniac.  While washing her hands in a hotel bathroom, she takes a wallet from an unguarded purse, launching the rest of the chapter.  Egan herself was washing her hands in a hotel bathroom when she saw a wallet sticking out of an unguarded purse.  She began to think about how someone was likely to take it, then realized that, as she was the only one in the bathroom, that someone would obviously have to be her.  This made her reflect on what it would feel like to be a thief.  She’d been the victim of theft herself but had focused only on her own experience, never considering the situation from the opposite point of view.  What’s particularly cool about this is that the first chapter was never meant to be a first chapter: it was meant to be a short story.  Egan found, though, that characters she mentioned briefly in the story intrigued her, and so she wrote other stories about them, and soon she had a whole book on her hands.  While parts of Egan’s book are dramatic, sad, or tense, this chapter was a crowd pleaser: humorous on the surface, but still poignant. 

Eugenides was introduced by the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and I can say without hesitation that it was the worst introduction for an author I have ever heard.  He spoke without notes, which is fine, but ended up describing all of his books using the same adjectives (words like “brilliant” and “compelling” appeared again and again in his speech) and you could have replaced “Eugenides” with just about anyone’s name and not changed the message.  It sounded as though they'd called him ten minutes before he was to speak and asked him to get off the couch, put on a tie, and come up with an introduction, pronto.  To my immense relief, he was off the stage within two minutes and Eugenides took it.  I was prepared not to like him.  His books, while very good, are a touch strange, and I figured he’d be one of those authors to whom it was hard to listen.  His appearance matched my prediction.  He was monochromatic, in a black shirt and a suit and tie both of dark charcoal.  He is balding, and his black goatee and the hair at the sides of his head all seemed to stick out in sharp angles.  His first words were ones of apology: he had just arrived from Europe that day, and in addition to jet lag, he was recovering from a bout of food poisoning.  He said he wished the reading was not being streamed in a live webcast, then commented that this gave the term “going viral” a whole new meaning.  The audience exploded with laughter, and kept at it throughout his brilliantly deadpan reading of a selection from The Marriage Plot, his newest book.  The story was both funny and so authentic that it was difficult to believe that Eugenides had never spent time as a 20-year-old girl, so real was his protagonist.

During the Q & A, we learned that both authors have very similar philosophies when it comes to writing.  Each likes to cover completely new territory with each book, so that not only the subject matter but also the style change dramatically each time.  Egan said that this has made it hard to learn from the experiences of writing other books when she sets out to begin a new one because, in many ways, it’s like starting from the very beginning of her career each time.  Eugenides echoed this, relating that while writing his first book, The Virgin Suicides, he was focused on voice, while he concerned himself with plot during the second, Middlesex, and delved into characters while writing The Marriage Plot.  I can attest that the characters in Middlesex are quite well developed, but perhaps he did this unintentionally while focusing on plot.  

Egan: "To Beth, with gigantic good wishes!!!"

Ed and I waited in the longest line I've ever seen for a book signing. When we finally reached the front, I had a choice of going to either one, or to both; I, of course, selected the latter. Eugenides freed up first, while Egan had another line behind her about 5 people deep. I thought at first it was because he was less popular, but I discovered it was because he was simply scrawling his name, not making small talk or writing messages or even people's names. I asked him how he was feeling, and he gave me something between a smile and a grimace that made it plain he couldn't wait for this to be over. Egan, on the other hand, was downright bubbly, as evidenced by her almost middle school girl-ish message in my book. Certainly an odd couple, but a thoroughly enjoyable one, and I couldn't be happier with the end of my literary streak.