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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
You sure seem to like unconventional narrators. First you use first-person plural, then it's first-person omniscient.
I seem drawn to impossible narrative voices for some reason. I think it's related to religious literature in a way. I think with the Bible and certain religious texts, this voice sort of speaks to you. You don't know where it's coming from and yet it's mesmerizing and is full of (supposedly) wisdom and you have to listen to it. I like books where the narrative voice is in some way originless and you don't know exactly where it's coming from. That seems to me something that books can do that nothing else can do. And that is in a way the condition of literature as opposed to journalism, that kind of voice issuing from mystery.
"The Virgin Suicides" is also about a neighborhood while "Middlesex" is about Detroit. Is that something you intended for this novel all along?
Once I knew I was going to write a book that dealt with history, I wanted to bring Detroit into it. I do have a perverse love for my hometown, and I think Detroit as a setting is really rich material. It's this great industrial city that has decayed. It produced Motown, Madonna and now Eminem, but it's also been destroyed by racism. All these things that are in Detroit seem central to the American experience to me. I've never found a reason to write about another place because everything I was interested in writing about was already there where I was born even though I left many years ago.
I wanted to bring in as much Detroit history as I could, and as I started to read more about Detroit, things just seemed to apply to this story. I found out that the Nation of Islam was founded in 1932, exactly the year I was writing about, in Detroit. And the Nation of Islam was founded by a man who was supposedly a mulatto and he worked in the silk trade and no one knew exactly where he came from and he had all these theories about racial origins and genetic transformation, and this was exactly what "Middlesex" was about. My grandparents and the grandparents in the novel were silk farmers. It all seemed connected.
There's also the strange coincidence that a Mr. Eugenides is described in T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" as "the merchant from Smyrna." What about the burning of Smyrna? Were your grandparents really there?
No, and I hasten to add that they also were not brother and sister. Greek-Americans are obsessed with the burning of Smyrna [by the Turks in 1922]. Once Smyrna came in, I knew I had to work in Mr. Eugenides. My Latin teacher was the first person to point out to me that I had the same name as someone in T.S. Eliot, and that seemed like a calling to become a writer.
It seemed like the construction of this book involved an unusual number of coincidences.
I had some incredible coincidences in writing this book. My wife had to go see an endocrinologist on the Upper West Side. We went up there, and I started asking him questions about genetics because I'd been reading all this genetics and sexology material. He said, "Are you a physician?" And I said, "No, but I'm writing this novel about a hermaphroditic condition," and I start to explain to him what it is when he swivels around and takes out this old yellowed journal, and it turns out that he was one of the original researchers of the article that I was basing my novel on.
That's weird.
It was. Want to hear another one? I was writing about River Rouge plant, the Ford plant, and I happened to call a friend in Michigan who lives nowhere near the plant, and a woman answered and said, "Hello? We just had an explosion!" It turned out that my phone call had somehow been re-routed to the River Rouge plant, which had a big explosion on that day.
The last one I'll tell you about is that I was trying to describe the grandparents in the book, and so I was trying to remember this old photo of my grandparents that my parents had in the basement. I hadn't seen it in 10 years, and so I was struggling to remember it, and just as I was writing that description, the doorbell rang and it was the FedEx man who was delivering that same picture from my parents' basement that had been there for years. My mother, without telling me, had gotten it framed and sent it to me, and she didn't know I was writing about them or anything. That was very strange.
Did that ever spook you?
When you're writing a book that takes as long as this one did, that's the sort of thing you need.
