美国国家公共电台 NPR Jeffrey Eugenides Calls Short Stories 'Maddening' — And Now He Has A Collection

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Jeffrey Eugenides is well-known for his novels. He won the Pulitzer for "Middlesex." But his latest work, a collection of short stories, is a departure.

JEFFREY EUGENIDES: Short stories are difficult, maddening, little puzzles. And I've been trying to learn how to write them since I first started to write.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Jeffrey Eugenides's new collection of stories is called "Fresh Complaint." And he joins us from Princeton University. Good morning.

EUGENIDES: Good morning.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I'm curious - you know, did you pull them together thematically from a larger work, or are these just the short stories that you actually wrote, and you put them together in a book?

EUGENIDES: These are all the stories that I wrote and deemed worthy 1 for consumption (laughter) in my life. There's a lot of other ones that are in various boxes and desks. But this goes back to the first story I ever had published, which was in the Gettysburg Review. It's almost like reading your diary from your 20s. When I read the story, I remember who I was and what I was reading and what I was thinking about, in terms of literature, at that time.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Did you change anything? Did you update it? Or did you...

EUGENIDES: No, I didn't think that was - I didn't think that would be right or fair. I kept the stories the way they were when they were written. Much of the book - I didn't want the book just to be older stories. So quite a lot of the page count is new fiction that I've written in the last couple of years.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Let's talk about these stories. What links the protagonists 2 in these tales? I'm thinking about the men in particular.

EUGENIDES: Well, I don't know. You know, the writer is the animal, and the readers are the zoologists 3. So they have to decide what kind of connection there is between these different creatures. My editor did say that there is a kind of progression or arc in that the presentation of a male experience gets older - that some of the early stories like "Airmail" deal with a college student who's traveling the globe and searching for the truth about life. And some of the other stories about - are about men who are married and have children and are confronting financial problems and stalled careers and problems that you would encounter in middle age.

So there's a kind of questing, aspirational 4 but also thwarted 5 quality to a lot of the men in these stories - a kind of sadness. And then at the end, in the largest story, "Fresh Complaint," a character coming out on the other end of a great mistake in his life and learning from it and moving on, hopefully, to better times. So in that way, I think there's a full progression of a descent and, hopefully, a sort of ascent 6 at the end.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: There are - there's one story, the first one, which is a portrayal 7 of sort of deep women's friendship. It's called "Complainers." It's very touching 8. Where did that story come from? And tell us about what it's about.

EUGENIDES: Well, that story is based on my mother, who died just this last spring suffering from dementia. I notice a lot of people my age are dealing 9 with that and writing stories about their parents suffering dementia. But I wanted to try to do it in a different way. And instead of writing about my mother's decline, I wanted to write about the part of her life that I knew the least about. And that had to do with a lifelong friendship she had with a woman who was much younger. And so I investigated and imagined their friendship.

And I tried to tell a story about these two women and how they had gone through difficulties in their marriages, difficulties with their children but had kept together by reading this this book about an Alaskan legend that becomes emblematic 10 for their lives and then also about dementia. I was writing that story for a couple of years while my mother declined. And it was a way of keeping her present for myself and keeping her alive in a sense, keeping her intact.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What makes short stories so maddening? You used the word maddening.

EUGENIDES: Oh, they're so - there's no space. I mean, they're very short. That's the problem with a short story.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: (Laughter).

EUGENIDES: You get it going. And then you have to shut it down. And I am a novelist by inclination 11. I get an idea. And then that suggests another idea or another character. Or let's change the point of view, and let's have many points of view. And I've tried to do that in some of these stories. I've thought about them as novels that I've just compressed into a small space. But it's just a different kind of thing. You're trying to boil experience down into a very small precipitant. And there's something fun and, yeah, maddening because it's difficult. But there's you can just keep playing with it and keep playing with it and trying to get it to work. Oh, years and years can go by in this process in a happy...

GARCIA-NAVARRO: And have.

EUGENIDES: In a happy way. And have. Yes.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: All right. Jeffrey Eugenides's new collection of stories is called "Fresh Complaint." He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Thank you very much for joining us.

EUGENIDES: Thank you.

(SOUNDBITE OF WITCH HOUSE'S "NUJABES")