Generally, this is because Eugenides is interested in unpleasant people doing unpleasant things. Men in these stories seduce much younger women they destroy their marriages they abuse positions of power and catalog the breasts of every woman they see.
In “Baster,” the narrator learns that his beautiful, out-of-his-league ex-girlfriend has asked an acquaintance to be her sperm donor, so he promptly disposes of the other guy’s sperm sample and replaces it with his own, without her knowledge. In “Find the Bad Guy,” the narrator cheats on his beautiful, out-of-his-league wife and then violates his restraining order to spy on her. The Guardian summarized the stories in the collection as “men behaving badly,” and for the most part, the men are behaving sexually badly, mostly toward women.
And as such, there’s an ever-present danger that Eugenides’s writing may step over the fine line between commenting on the objectification of women and just straight up doing some objectifying of its own.įresh Complaint is certainly not exempt from that danger. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-markĮugenides’s stories tend to dwell on how men objectify women and use them as screens on which to project their own anxieties about sex and power and masculinity in The Virgin Suicides, for instance, the beautiful and tragic Lisbon sisters become the means through which the neighborhood boys work out their own confusions over adolescence and longing.
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