This Week in Fiction: Jeffrey Eugenides

Charlie D., the protagonist of this week’s story, “Find the Bad Guy,” is a radio consultant in Texas. He comes across as a Texan good ol’ boy, but it turns out he was born in Michigan (“I’m from Traverse City, originally. Got to talking this way on account of living down here so long.”) When did you first start hearing Charlie D.’s Texan voice? And why did you decide to make him a displaced Midwesterner?

Jasper Johns, in explaining how to make a work of art, kept things simple. “Take an object,” he said. “Do something to it. Do something else to it.” The first time I heard that quotation, it struck me as an oversimplification. But I’ve changed my mind. At bottom, the creative process really is that simple.

My experience of writing “Find the Bad Guy” is a perfect example. I didn’t start out with Charlie D. being a Texan. The first drafts of the story were told in a different voice entirely. The narrator wasn’t even called Charlie D. One day, dissatisfied with the pages I’d written, I decided to do something to them. So I re-wrote the story in a Texas twang. Some days later, I did something else: I made Charlie a Michigander putting on this Texan voice. The story is about truth and deceit, so the more convoluted Charlie’s voice became, the better. It seemed funny to me that Charlie was actually from the upper Midwest and had picked up his accent as an adult. It also showed how estranged he was from himself, and hinted at the repercussions of this estrangement, which aren’t in the least bit funny but as serious as can be. After I had the voice, I kept doing things to the narrative. I gave Charlie a job in radio. I gave him a German wife, and made her very tall. I kept doing things to my paper object until it became a story. Dozens of small little decisions, one at a time.

The story follows Charlie D. over the course of one evening as he hides in the bushes outside his home. His wife, Johanna, has taken out a restraining order against him and he’s spying on his family. How important is Charlie’s attachment to his house? Why is he unable to keep away?

Houses are important in fiction. “Howard’s End” is maybe the best example, but there are lots of others. Nabokov drew the floor plan to the Samsas’s apartment in his lecture on “The Metamorphosis,” and I’ve always kept that lesson in mind. If you picture a house or an apartment when you’re writing, you can see your characters more clearly. You know where they are, and you move them through a defined space. The reader can sense when a writer isn’t sure about these logistics. If you’re unsure about the room your characters are situated in, some of that fuzziness will get transmitted into the scene itself. You need to have specificity around you, even if you don’t mention one item of that specificity.

The house in my novel “Middlesex” is very important. The narrator often refers to the house as “Middlesex,” in fact. Its newfangled design accords with the unconventional nature of the book’s narrator, Cal, and its conventional furnishings demonstrate the resistance Cal’s family has toward anything newfangled. The Lisbon house in “The Virgin Suicides” also plays a central role in the book. The entire novel, in a sense, enacts a surveillance of the house. So, for whatever reason, houses have a strong hold on me psychologically.

In “Find the Bad Guy,” I’ve got a house once again, but the focus is different. Charlie D. is outside, looking in, like the collective narrator in “The Virgin Suicides.” But there’s not the same mystery or curiosity at work. It’s not that he wonders what’s going on inside the house. It’s that he knows. Curiosity has been replaced by exile.

The second narrative strand in the story concerns Charlie’s experiences in couple’s counselling with Johanna. You might expect a character like Charlie to dismiss the idea of counselling out of hand, yet he embraces the process of “introspecting.” The story’s often very funny about the concepts he encounters in his therapy sessions, yet Charlie himself takes them seriously. Was it hard to balance satire and sincerity here?

Again, this came little by little. Making Charlie something of a redneck increased the satire of the counselling sessions, as one wouldn’t expect a good ol’ boy to read self-help marriage books. His doing so, despite his reservations, however, demonstrates how invested Charlie is in his marriage and his family, and takes the story beyond mere satire to something, I hope, of emotional gravity. Comedy is a serious thing. It’s the bright door of the funhouse you emerge from, later, in tears. But you’re right. The balance is delicate. Sometimes I took the comedy too far and your editing reigned me in.

The last piece of yours we published in the magazine was an excerpt from your novel, “The Marriage Plot.” You’ve talked in the past about how long you spend working on your novels. Do you approach short stories in a similar way? What does the form offer you that a novel doesn’t?

It takes me forever to write short stories too! They’re even harder, in a way. I’m working on another story at the moment that has gone through so many iterations that years have passed without my figuring out how to tell it. By contrast, “Find the Bad Guy” got written in a fairly short period for me, about six or eight weeks. I don’t have any firm principles when it comes to writing stories. Sometimes I think that the trick of writing a good story is to compress a novel’s worth of material into a short space. Other times, I think it’s best to present a small passage of time that is somehow representative of an entire life or situation. To keep my short stories properly short, lately I’ve been conceiving of them as poems. Long poems, where stuff happens. You want a maximum density of language and you want to leave out everything but the essentials.

Charlie is an avid player of Words with Friends, waiting for the moment when the other player’s letters “appear out of nowhere, like a sprinkle of stardust.” Do you play Words with Friends yourself? Is it a help or a hindrance to the fiction writer?

Yes, in the past year I’ve become an obsessive Words with Friends player. I have the game on my phone, as Charlie does, and I drew on this new infatuation to express both Charlie’s loneliness and, in the therapeutic terms of the story, his need for connection. Smart phones aren’t about intelligence at all. They’re about emotion. It seemed sad to me to have Charlie waiting and waiting for his daughter to play a word. That’s all that’s left of his connection to her, and it turns W.W.F. from a time-wasting app into a vehicle by which he can express his paternal love, or at least try. In “The Marriage Plot,” there’s a bit from Roland Barthes’s “A Lover’s Discourse” about waiting for the telephone to ring. Remember how agonizing it was in the old days, making sure you didn’t tie up the line in case your lover called? We’ve got voice mail now, and texting, but the agony of waiting hasn’t changed one bit. In fact, it might be even worse. It doesn’t just happen with romantic partners now, but with friends and family members. Our ability to be in constant touch with people has made us less able to be alone, and therefore more constantly agitated.