Mixed Feelings about "Fresh Complaint," by Jeffrey Eugenides

I have written here before about issues of, and my feelings about, gender in literature, meaning mainly the differences (when present) between fiction by female and male authors. Of course – please take it as a given – I believe that great fiction can and is produced by both women and men. But why do I read more novels and short stories by women than by men? Originally, back when I was in late college and in grad school, as a budding feminist, I wanted to reclaim the writing of female authors, and to balance out the years of being taught, and reading, almost all male authors. But I also, often but not always, felt more “at home” in the works of women authors. I resisted that feeling to some extent, not wanting to open the door to men’s saying the same thing about fiction by men. With time, I have found I read a real mix of both, but that I lean (OK, fairly markedly) toward writings by women (as readers of this blog will have noticed). All of this is prologue to writing about my feelings about Jeffrey Eugenides’ latest book, a collection of short stories titled “Fresh Complaint” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). I found the stories interesting and well-written, but I had an increasing sense of being immersed in a male world. Nothing wrong with that, and Eugenides has certainly written about female characters in the past (although there is some controversy about the way he has positioned those characters), and I wrote a positive post about his novel “The Marriage Plot” (I read his earlier novels “The Virgin Suicides” and “Middlesex” before I started this blog). However, I felt somehow forced into the male perspective in a way that I don’t with women writers, nor with with male writers such as Colm Toibin, Kent Haruf, William Trevor, and Richard Russo. It is true that one of the two main characters in Eugenides’ title story “Fresh Complaint” is a young woman, but she is a young woman who manipulates and partially destroys the lead male character for her own purposes, in a way that will raise alarming connections to some of the news stories of today; some accused men defend themselves precisely by saying that their female accusers are conspiring to defame them. (This is not exactly what happens in the story here, but close enough.) I will add that these stories are not overtly or traditionally masculine or macho; I almost have an easier time with those, as they don’t even pretend to be anything other than that. It is writers such as Eugenides (or Jonathan Franzen), who present themselves as more understanding of female characters and lives, that disappoint me when their work indicates otherwise. (Although, in the spirit of yes-but-no-but, Eugenides does a good job of portraying a kind of “modern guy,” whose attributes still reflect the past but are being dragged into a newer present with different attitudes about gender.) I will end this post by saying that Eugenides’ book raises issues for me, and perhaps for other readers, that I don’t quite know how to resolve. And perhaps that is OK (it would be presumptuous and unlikely for me to claim to do so, when so many others have struggled with these issues), as long as it is part of an ongoing discussion about gender and literature, and of course about gender and politics, equity, and life.