Anna's Reviews > Fresh Complaint: Stories
Fresh Complaint: Stories
by
by
Wow.
Jeffrey Eugenides deserves all the accolades typically heaped on Pulitzer Prize winners.
In my reading journeys, I've often disagreed with these book jacket platitudes. In fact, I've found candidates for the prize usually better and more skilled writers than the winners, but in "Fresh Complaint," we find a scribe truly worth all the hype.
This is a compendium of Eugenides's work spanning three decades, and it shows his growth as a writer; each story is a fresh world to step into, with characters as vibrant and well-drawn as any in a great character-driven novel. The writing itself is excellent, so that even a decades-old story doesn't feel dated, and the characters and their strange circumstances feel immediate and important.
He doesn't shy away from uncomfortable topics in his writing, whether it's incest and sexual identity issues as in his Pulitzer-winner "Middlesex," or the sexual manipulations of teenage girls as in the title story of this book, Eugenides is a skilled-enough writer that he makes problems seem realistic without overwhelming readers with overly dark overtones, and he even makes you laugh in the middle of stories where seriousness isn't questioned.
Many books of short stories are superb downers -- I've read very few that are uplifting or really so richly researched that you can appreciate the writer's desire to get all the details right -- Eugenides does. This is a great read if you like reading about characters of all ages, ethnicities and problems of modern life in America.
Jeffrey Eugenides deserves all the accolades typically heaped on Pulitzer Prize winners.
In my reading journeys, I've often disagreed with these book jacket platitudes. In fact, I've found candidates for the prize usually better and more skilled writers than the winners, but in "Fresh Complaint," we find a scribe truly worth all the hype.
This is a compendium of Eugenides's work spanning three decades, and it shows his growth as a writer; each story is a fresh world to step into, with characters as vibrant and well-drawn as any in a great character-driven novel. The writing itself is excellent, so that even a decades-old story doesn't feel dated, and the characters and their strange circumstances feel immediate and important.
He doesn't shy away from uncomfortable topics in his writing, whether it's incest and sexual identity issues as in his Pulitzer-winner "Middlesex," or the sexual manipulations of teenage girls as in the title story of this book, Eugenides is a skilled-enough writer that he makes problems seem realistic without overwhelming readers with overly dark overtones, and he even makes you laugh in the middle of stories where seriousness isn't questioned.
Many books of short stories are superb downers -- I've read very few that are uplifting or really so richly researched that you can appreciate the writer's desire to get all the details right -- Eugenides does. This is a great read if you like reading about characters of all ages, ethnicities and problems of modern life in America.
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