Political Cynicism in Novels by Chinese Authors.

DATE June 5, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Jeffrey Eugenides, author of "The Virgin Suicides,"
discusses his book and the film version of the novel
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

The current movie, "The Virgin Suicides," is based on the novel of the same
name. My guest is the author of the book, Jeffrey Eugenides. The New Yorker
included him in its list of the 20-best American writers for the 21st century.
We invited Eugenides to join us from the BBC studio in Berlin, where he's now
living on a fellowship.

Let's start with a reading from "The Virgin Suicides," which was first
published in 1993. The story is told in the collective voice of several men
remembering back to their adolescence in the '70s, when they lived in a
wealthy suburb of Detroit and became obsessed with five sisters in the
neighborhood, the Lisbon girls. Each of the Lisbon girls committed suicide,
and the reasons remain a mystery. In an attempt to understand the suicides,
the novel becomes a reverie about the mysteries and unknowability of the world
of teen-aged girls.

Mr. JEFFREY EUGENIDES (Author): (Reading from "The Virgin Suicides") `On the
morning the last Lisbon daughter took a turn at suicide--it was Mary this
time, and sleeping pills, like Therese--the two paramedics arrived at the
house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the
beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out
of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly, in our opinion, and the fat
one said under his breath, "This ain't TV, folks. This is how fast we go."
He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had
grown monstrous, and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate 13 months
earlier when the trouble began.

Cecilia, the youngest, only 13, had gone first, slitting her wrists, like a
stoic, while taking a bath. And when they found her afloat in her pink pool,
with the yellow eyes of someone possessed and her small body giving off the
odor of a mature woman, the paramedics had been so frightened by her
tranquility that they had stood mesmerized. But then Mrs. Lisbon lunged in,
screaming, and the reality of the room reasserted itself: blood on the bath
mat, Mr. Lisbon's razor sunk in the toilet bowl, marbling the water. The
paramedics fetched Cecilia out of the warm water because it quickened the
bleeding, and put a tourniquet on her arm. Her wet hair hung down her back,
and already her extremities were blue. She didn't say a word, but when they
parted her hands, they found the laminated picture of the Virgin Mary she held
against her budding chest.'

GROSS: That's Jeffrey Eugenides reading from his novel, "The Virgin
Suicides."

Jeffrey, what was the germ of the idea of five sisters who all commit suicide?

Mr. EUGENIDES: It was a story told to me by my nephew's baby-sitter, almost
10 years ago now. I was back in Detroit visiting my brother and got to
talking to the baby-sitter that he and his wife had, and she was, I think,
about 15 or 16, and I only met her for about 15 minutes, and within that span
of time, she somehow told me that she and all her sisters had attempted
suicide, and I was obviously shocked by that, and I asked her why, and she
couldn't tell me why. She just said that she was under a lot of pressure.

And then she disappeared, and she never worked for my brother again, and I was
left with that exchange and that mystery, and lingered in my mind after that.
But it was probably over a year or two before I began the novel, and I had the
idea of a quintuple suicide in my mind, but I didn't know how to tell the
story, and at a certain point, I got the idea to tell the story with a
collective narrator, and once I had the voice of the novel and the plot, or
the story, then I started writing it.

GROSS: The collective narrator, that's the voice of the boys who fantasize
about these five sisters, and find them very kind of sexual and mysterious, in
the way that young teen-age boys find young teen-age girls.

Their suicides--the girls' suicides--is a great mystery to these boys, and
it's a mystery they never quite solve. Do you feel like you solved it?

Mr. EUGENIDES: No. No, I didn't. I mean, the book is really about the
survivors of suicide more than the victims of suicide, and I've known a few
people in my own life who've committed suicide, and have been always left with
a lot of questions in the same way, and that was--that's my experience with
suicide, so that's how I dealt with it in the book. I tried to give a lot of
different possible reasons, including the narrative voice, as showing why the
girls might have done it. But I never thought that anyone who I've known
who's committed suicide, you could point to one exact reason.

GROSS: Did you know a lot of people who committed suicide?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I knew two people who committed suicide, and the one that
stuck in my mind the most was a guy I went to college with who came over to my
house the day before and we got to talking about Zen for some reason, and he
wanted to know what I knew about Zen. And I sensed that he was very eager and
a little bit manic to find out some solution to his problems in his life, but
I never realized he was that depressed. And he actually borrowed a book from
me on Zen and went home, and the next day, he killed himself.

GROSS: What questions did that raise for you? Did you wonder, like, if your
conversation put him over the edge or anything?

Mr. EUGENIDES: No. I mean, I could see that was the kind of experience that
made me realize, you know, how limited is our understanding about the people's
consciousness and the extent of their suffering, really. Because he
wasn't--nothing we talked about was remotely connected to suicide.

GROSS: To the boys who narrate "The Virgin Suicides," the world of teen-age
girls is very exotic, very out of reach and kind of forbidden. And there's a
short passage that I think really sums up how exotic the teen-age girls' world
appears to the boys. And this is a sentence that has to do with--you know,
they're telling the story of how one of the boys was over at the girls' house,
one of the few boys ever to go over to the girls' house, and he needed the
bathroom and I think the downstairs bathroom was taken, so he had to go
upstairs to the girl's bathroom, to one of the sister's bathroom.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Right.

GROSS: Would you read the sentence?

Mr. EUGENIDES: Sure. `He came back to us with stories of bedrooms filled
with crumpled panties; of stuffed animals hugged to death by the passion of
the girls; of a crucifix draped with a brassiere; of gauzy chambers, of canopy
beds and of the effluvia of so many young girls becoming women together in the
same cramped space.'

GROSS: Do you remember that era of your life, and did teen-age girls seem
really exotic...

Mr. EUGENIDES: Yes.

GROSS: ...and very sexual and very forbidden?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I obviously remember it. People sometimes, having read the
book, ask me, `You must have had sisters,' but actually the truth is that I
only had brothers, and for that reason, a house with even one girl was always
an exotic place for me. And when I was ever in a house with three or four, it
was only multiplied. And I did feel that way. The bedrooms, the conduct of
the parents and the paraphernalia in the house with girls in it was so alien
to me, and I would sort of pay attention and examine it as though I were on a
sort of archaeological dig or something.

GROSS: What did you find most exotic or arousing about the idea of a girl's
bedroom or bathroom?

Mr. EUGENIDES: Just the amount of clothes and products and usually the sort
of slovenliness of the girls that I knew at that time; the amount of sweaters
on the floor, the amount of, you know, nail polish and spilled drinks and
everything that they would have in--I had a sort of neat little boy's bedroom
at home, so it always seemed like very much full of life when I would go to
other bedrooms of girls that I knew at the time.

GROSS: The girls' diaries are eventually published, as I recall, and the boys
read their diaries, and in one of the paragraphs they say, because of reading
the diaries, `We knew the pain of winter wind rushing up your skirt and the
ache of keeping your knees together in class and how drab and infuriating it
was to jump rope while the boys played baseball. We could never understand
why the girls cared so much about being mature, or why they felt compelled to
compliment each other, but sometimes after one of us had read a long portion
of the diary out loud, we had to fight back the urge to huge one another or
tell each other how pretty we were.' That's a really good and also really
funny passage that, you know, is--it kind of gets at their attempts at empathy
and what they could and couldn't relate to. Would you talk about writing
that?

Mr. EUGENIDES: Well, I just tried to think of being--you know, I tried to
remember when I was in sixth grade or something and I would see the girls sort
of cordoned off in a different world than we were in. We played a game called
kill the man with the ball on a gravel school yard lot, and we would just sort
of maul each other, and then across the way, all the girls would be jumping
rope. I just remembered that sort of partitioning in so many of the things in
the early '60s--I mean, in the late '60s and early '70s when I was growing up.
So I don't know what to say about--I didn't write it thinking to highlight any
of the things that came out. I just tried to stay true to how I remembered
feeling at the time.

GROSS: Have you ever found yourself wondering what girls find to be exotic
about boys, or appealing about boys as young teens?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I understood much later what girls liked about teen-age boys.
I was under the sort of mistaken impression for a long time that what they
liked was someone like them, someone perhaps more sensitive and talkative and
someone who reads books and things like that, but I actually found that as
boys are sometimes attracted by the opposite, girls seemed to be also
attracted by the opposite.

GROSS: Which kind of boy were you?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I was the mistakenly sensitive one.

GROSS: Who read books.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Yeah.

GROSS: My guest is Jeffrey Eugenides, author of the novel "The Virgin
Suicides," which is the basis of the current film. Let's hear the scene we
were just talking about. This scene has a couple of shifts in time and point
of view. It begins with the boys reading from Cecilia's diary, which the
plumber found after her first suicide attempt. Then the reading continues as
we hear the voice of Cecilia reading an entry about her sister Lux. The scene
ends with some reflections from the film's narrator, played by actor Giovanni
Ribisi.

(Soundbite from "The Virgin Suicides")

Unidentified Actor #1: `Today, we went out on the boat. It was pretty cold.
We saw a couple of whales. Lux leaned over and stroked the whale. I didn't
think they would stink so much. It's the kelp in their baleens rotting. And
I hope we can go again sometime.'

And look, here that--let's do that.

`Lux lost it over Kevin'--is it Hines?

Unidentified Actor #2: Hines. The garbage man.

Unidentified Actor #1: The garbage man.

Unidentified Actress: `Lux lost it over Kevin Haines(ph), the garbage man.
She'd wake up at five in the morning and hang out casually on the front steps,
like it wasn't completely obvious. She wrote his name in marker on all her
bras and underwear and Mom found them and bleached out all the "Kevins." Lux
was crying on her bed all day.'

Mr. GIOVANNI RIBISI (Narrator): And so we started to learn about their
lives. Coming to hold collected memories of times we hadn't experienced, we
felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made it your mind active and
dreamy and how you ended up knowing what colors went together. We knew that
the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even
death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to
fascinate them. We knew that they knew everything about us, and that we
couldn't fathom them at all.

GROSS: We'll talk more with the author of "The Virgin Suicides" after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest is Jeffrey Eugenides. He wrote
the novel "The Virgin Suicides" that was recently adapted into a film.

When the first girl attempts suicide in your novel and survives, she's taken
to a psychiatrist, and he says, `What are you doing here, honey? You're not
even old enough to know how bad life gets.' And she answers, `Obviously,
Doctor, you've never been a 13-year-old girl.' Now Sofia Coppola, who made the
film adaptation of your novel, said that that's the line that really made her
want to do the movie, because she'd been a 13-year-old girl. And I was
wondering your reaction to her reaction to that passage?

Mr. EUGENIDES: You know, the line is somewhat comic to me, and I was just
glad that it struck a chord in her or in anyone else. Certainly, that's a
line that has been repeated back to me quite often from women.

GROSS: Now you obviously have never been a 13-year-old girl yourself, but
you're not writing from the prospective of a 13-year-old girl, you're writing
from the prospective of the boys who are interested in these young girls. I
think the movie adaptation tells a story a little bit from the perspective of
the girls, too, because we're often alone with them in their rooms or alone
with them in their scenes in the way that we're not in the novel, because it
is always from the boys' point of view.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Right.

GROSS: And I'm wondering what you think of that slight shift of perspective
in the movie? I assume that you've seen it.

Mr. EUGENIDES: I have seen it. I knew that the point of view in the movie
would necessarily be more from the girls than the boys. I mean, it's very
clear in the book that it's always--anything they know about the girls is
mediated through another source, and so therefore suspect, and the reader
knows that what the boys are telling the reader might not be exactly the
truth. In a movie, when you have the girls in a scene and they're real-live
girls and Kirsten Dunst is up on the screen, the audience can only believe
this is actually the truth. Sofia was fairly scrupulous in tipping the
audience off, you know, so that we know that the boys are watching all the
time. But it's impossible to keep that in your mind, and the movie doesn't
remind the audience, the reader, as often as the book does. So that was
something I knew would happen.

I also felt that Sofia saw the book more from the girl's point of view,
because of her identification with the 13-year-old girl. And I've noticed in
readers, in general, women will read the book and sort of see it from the
girls' side and boys will read it and see it from the boys' side.

GROSS: There's a character and something he does that I want to ask you
about. There's a character named Trip Fontaine who's the handsome teen that
all the girls have a crush on. And he takes one of the sisters to the
homecoming. They have sex on the football field after the homecoming party.
And when she falls asleep, he leaves, he walks out on her, and she has to take
a cab home alone. He later says, `I liked her, I really liked her. I just
got sick of her right then.' Would you explain that for us? I think that's
probably really getting to something that's really mysterious to girls and
women about boys.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Well, I mean, that is something--I've heard similar things
from friends, and--not that many, but looking at his character, thinking about
how Trip Fontaine had grown up, I felt that that would be his reaction at that
time. I don't think it's pandemic in men to act that way, actually. I just
thought that in that situation, with those characters, that's what would have
happened.

GROSS: Why? Because he's self-absorbed or no empathy. Maybe you just
intuitively knew that that's how he would behave.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Well, a lot of the decisions in the book are just taken from
things I witnessed, so I sort of don't have to always know the reason...

GROSS: Uh-huh.

Mr. EUGENIDES: ...why someone acted that way. I just remember that in such
a situation this person did react that way, and it's more reporting. I mean,
this book is not a psychological book in terms of going into different
people's heads. So I'm not sure that I can answer that. I think, you know,
you would come up with the kind of trivialities about not being able to
connect or the problem with his mother leaving him that I actually wouldn't
want to indulge in.

GROSS: You grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, which is a suburb of Detroit.
I believe that's a very affluent...

Mr. EUGENIDES: It is.

GROSS: ...suburb of Detroit.

Mr. EUGENIDES: I was born in Detroit and then we moved to Grosse Pointe.

GROSS: And the novel is set in a similar suburban setting. What were some of
the things that you remember about growing up in a suburb that you wanted to
put into the novel?

Mr. EUGENIDES: The biggest thing I think about where I grew up and how it
affected the book was that in Detroit, obviously going through the riots in
1967, I saw the city sort of be destroyed and my experience of growing up was
with things coming apart and falling apart. And it imbued my childhood with a
sense of elegy and a sense of entropy that I think is really the basic spirit
of "The Virgin Suicides." When I really think `Why did I write this book?' I
think it comes from growing up in a city and at a time, even in America, where
things seemed to be getting worse and falling apart in society and the
economy. And, you know, in my life, any time we would get in the car and
drive, we would see burned-out houses and burned-out streets. The bar that my
grandfather owned was burned down, and it was like--not exactly growing up in
Beirut, but it had that kind of feeling. And I think those atmospherics are
really central to the book, and actually central to my inspiration for writing
it.

GROSS: Since your--was it your grandfather's bar, did you say, that was
burned down?

Mr. EUGENIDES: My grandfather's bar, yeah.

GROSS: Did that mean that you took the riots kind of personally, as like a
personal condemnation?

Mr. EUGENIDES: No, no. It wasn't burned--his bar was burned down later. It
wasn't burned down during the riots. But the neighborhood was sort of hurt by
the riots and got worse and worse and finally, like many things in Detroit,
his bar was burned.

GROSS: What was it like to live surrounded by prosperity after that?

Mr. EUGENIDES: It's a very strange way to grow up. It's almost an
experience like a South African upbringing or something like that. Incredible
racial divide; I've never experienced a racial divide like Detroit's. And you
just--the enmity and the misunderstanding in a place like that affects you
very strongly. You know, I went to a prep school, so it was actually the only
school where there were black students, and otherwise in Grosse Pointe, in the
public schools, there weren't any black students at all.

GROSS: Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of "The Virgin Suicides," which is the
basis of the new film. He'll be back in the second half of the show. I'm
Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Funding credits given)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

Coming up, we continue our conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides, author of "The
Virgin Suicides." Maureen Corrigan reviews two novels about China: one, a
fictional biography of Madame Mao; the other, a detective story. And jazz
critic Kevin Whitehead reviews the new CD by pianist Andrew Hill. We're
listening to it now.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross, back with Jeffrey Eugenides. His
1993 novel, "The Virgin Suicides," has been adapted into a film by Sofia
Coppola. Eugenides has also written short stories and book reviews.

In a review that you wrote of Tom Wolfe's novel, "A Man in Full," you
described yourself as a guy who spends all day in his room. But when you were
young, you must have traveled a lot because I know you traveled through Egypt,
you worked with Mother Teresa...

Mr. EUGENIDES: Yeah. Yeah, I took a year off in college and traveled around
the world for nine months on $3,500. And it was a great experience. And,
yeah, I lived four months in India and did work for a short time with Mother
Teresa and went as far as Thailand and went all through Europe and went to
North Africa.

GROSS: How did you get involved with Mother Teresa and what kind of work did
you do with her?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I worked at the Home for the Destitute and Dying, which is
sort of her flagship, some operation, where people are brought in close to
death and usually do die; sometimes recover. And a lot of people work there
in the morning. But European and American and Australian volunteers can come
in for three or four hours and work and the rest of the time, the Sisters run
the place.

And I didn't work there that long. And actually, I have something
half-written about that experience. But I found that I was not exactly
capable of becoming a missionary. It was sort of a turning point in my life
where I realized my vocation for writing and not my vocation for that sort of
commitment.

GROSS: And what made you realize that?

Mr. EUGENIDES: Well, some sort of lowly parts of my character which I've had
to embrace. But the fact that I actually couldn't get along or didn't enjoy
being with the other people who worked at Mother Teresa's. I found them, as
you might imagine, sometimes really lacking in any sense of humor. They
sometimes were very good but sort of good in a dull way. And I don't mean to
condemn them, but I just felt so different than them. I felt that anything
that was, you know, admirable about me just wasn't the same kind of thing. It
was admirable about them, and I just saw that it wasn't really my place to be.

And at the same time I was staying at the Salvation Army in Calcutta and
hanging out with some crazy Germans who had been traveling for 17 years and I
found them so interesting. And their openness of minds just appealed to me so
much more that it just seemed to come down to my life. It's a choosing
between two paths or something and I chose the other one.

GROSS: Did you meet Mother Teresa and did you think of her as a saint?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I met her briefly and saw her occasionally. And because
she's called a saint, I guess when you're so prepared to think of her as a
saint--my religious background wasn't sufficient that I actually believed in
actual sainthood or in magical properties in a person. But, obviously, I knew
that's Mother Teresa and, you know, watched her every move.

The strange thing is that when I saw her, who she reminded me of was George
Burns, the comedian, 'cause she was just sort of hunched over and had a
slightly humorous sort of aura about her, not that she was being funny but
there was just something that made you sort of smile. I mean, just put the
cigar in her hand, it would have been complete.

GROSS: She was really an old vaudevillian, wasn't she?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I thought so. I thought perhaps she'd taken the wrong path.

GROSS: Was it at all a spiritual experience and did you try to impose a
spirituality on it if it didn't feel spiritual, feeling like it was supposed
to feel spiritual?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I tried to impose a spirituality on it. The short story I'm
writing about it will hopefully explain all this better than I can in speech.
If you ever read William James' varieties of religious experiences, a long
passage about people in late adolescence which is what I still felt I was at
around 20 and that they have enough ego to make sort of very strict decisions
about themselves, and yet, their ego is still unformed and sort of cloud-like.
And they feel affinity for sort of mystical states, and I think that describes
me pretty well. I was sort of putting on another persona and trying to live a
life to see whether I could do it. And I was very mystically minded in that
time. And, you know, I wouldn't take it back.

It was one of the greatest periods of my life and I think perhaps the
happiest, but in some ways it was a little bit of a theater piece, sort of
acting the missionary and trying to see if I could change my life completely.
And I had certain models in my mind, like, Thomas Merton or people like that,
sort of literary, religious saints or converts, people who had really changed
their lives radically, and I wanted that sort of thing. I think in many ways
I wanted to escape my body or my physical existence because of all of the sort
of difficulties one has with passion and with dating and with all of that sort
of thing when you're 20. And I think part of that sort of inspired me to sort
of move up from my lower shock risen to my upper shock ...(unintelligible) and
sort of turned to vapor and come out my head. You know, that's sort of what I
wanted.

GROSS: Right. Right.

Mr. EUGENIDES: And I got over it.

GROSS: Right. Can't deal with it, transcend it.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Right.

GROSS: I'm wondering how your parents felt about this, and I'm going to go
back to "The Virgin Suicides" and quote a line here. When a daughter is found
dead after she commits suicide with the picture of the Virgin Mary in her
hands, her father later says, `We baptized her, we confirmed her, and now she
believes this crap.' Do you think your parents might have had a slightly
similar reaction when you were out working with Mother Teresa?

Mr. EUGENIDES: My parents at the time were not very religious. My father
was never religious and I didn't have a very religious upbringing. My family
was, I would say, extremely alarmed at my behavior during what is known as the
Mother Teresa Years(ph).

In playing out this role and trying to see how it fit, I certainly wrote
letters home that were ecstatic and troubling to my mother and to my brothers.
And, you know, to me, it was just more fiction writing. What I was really
doing was writing fiction, but they didn't understand that. They just saw
that it was a letter home.

I was out of contact with them, and they didn't know what was happening to me.
And I have written a short story actually that deals with that experience
called "Air Mail(ph)," which is about a young guy in Thailand who is very sick
with amebic dysentery who's writing letters home and letters to everyone that
he knows about his spiritual adventure that he's going on. And he's half
enlightened and half cracked. And I, again, took my own life and exaggerated
it beyond what I went through.

I was actually not quite around the bend, but anyhow, my parents were--the
strange thing is after that, my brother became a born-again Christian and my
mother became religious and now they're sort of the fanatics in the family.
I'm sort of the secular one again.

GROSS: My guest is Jeffrey Eugenides, author of the novel "The Virgin
Suicides." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: Jeffrey Eugenides is my guest. He's the author of the novel, "The
Virgin Suicides" that was recently adapted into a movie.

Now Granta, the literary magazine, last year named you one of the best young
American novelists. The New Yorker, at the end of 1999, put you on a list of
the best writers of the 21st century, a snapshot of a generation on the eve of
the next century. Now I believe you're about to turn 40?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I am 40 now.

GROSS: You are 40.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Yeah.

GROSS: So you're officially not a young writer anymore.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Yeah, I'm officially no longer qualified to be in those
lists.

GROSS: Exactly. Exactly. Did that feel like you were crossing a threshold
or just a kind of unimportant, imagery threshold that, you know...

Mr. EUGENIDES: No, that affected my life more than having the book made into
a movie. Turning 40, you suddenly realize that you're no longer a young
writer. I was happy to see that George Eliot wrote "Middlemarch" at 50,
though, so you're always sort of looking ahead to the older people to, you
know, make yourself feel a little bit better about the future.

GROSS: Well, what's the difference in feeling like you're officially a young
writer and then feeling you're no longer officially a young writer?

Mr. EUGENIDES: Well, from my friends who have jumped the great divide
already, they actually tell me that it's sort of a relief because you don't
have to worry about these kinds of groupings. I do think once you're 40 you
feel like you must know what you're doing; whereas, maybe in your 20s and 30s,
you're a little happier to be at sea.

Writing books, you know, makes one feel always that you're a little bit at
sea, so it's probably a little bit more difficult in your 40s to carry on and
not feel that you don't have all the answers. But on the other hands, having
a child and turning 40, it's a great disciplining force in my life. And I
find that for the first time in my life, I get up extremely early and start
working instead of dawdling over my coffee and things like that. So I
actually have found it beneficial to become old.

GROSS: Or older, anyway.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Yeah.

GROSS: I think there's a special attitude toward young writers now, like,
thank God, there are some because the belief is that few young people are
interested in reading, let along writing. Did you feel that there was a
special sense of gratitude to young writers?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I don't think so. I was just reading the article about
Philip Roth in The New Yorker where he's saying every year 70 writers die;
only two are replaced. And he says, you know, you can look at it--it's the
continuation of the screen, from the movie screen to the television screen to
the computer screen, but I grew up with the television screen and now the
computer screen. And, you know, I don't find anything in my life as rewarding
as reading, so I'm not quite as pessimistic as he is about young people
reading. And I get a lot of mail from young readers and, you know, I don't
sense that that strongly and I don't think anyone at The New Yorker or Granta
felt that either, that I could tell.

GROSS: You're living in Germany now. What brought you there?

Mr. EUGENIDES: I'm here on a fellowship from the--it's sort of the German
foreign exchange program and they have a smaller program within that called
the Berliner Kunsliv Program(ph). And that brings artists and writers and
composers from all over the world to live in Berlin. It's sort of a vestige
from the time that the wall was up to show free expression and artistic
creativity inside West Berlin, but it's survived fortunately. The wall's
coming down.

GROSS: What's it like for you to be in a country where your first language
isn't always understood and you're a writer functioning with diminished
language abilities?

Mr. EUGENIDES: It hasn't affected my writing at all because I spend most of
my time as I said in the article in my room. So most of the day is spent with
English in my head, and then when I go out to speak German or attempt my
German at night, I have actually enjoyed learning another language. And
people ask me, `Is it messing with your writing?' But it hasn't at all. My
German's not good enough to get into my brain that deeply at this point. I
don't know if there comes a point where you start dreaming it and then you
can't use English syntax, but I don't think that would happen.

GROSS: Has living in Germany been affecting what you choose to read?

Mr. EUGENIDES: Not too much so far. I read the German papers, so I know a
lot more about German politics and strikes and things like that than I never
did.

GROSS: So why don't you come back to the States?

Mr. EUGENIDES: That's open-ended. We like it here and we have no other
house, my wife and I, Karen. And Berlin is actually a pretty good city if you
have a small child, which we do. So we're staying another year and we'll see
how long we'll stay.

GROSS: Well, good luck there. Yeah.

Mr. EUGENIDES: It's more affordable than New York, so...

GROSS: Uh-huh. Well, it's been a pleasure to talk with you. Thank you so
much.

Mr. EUGENIDES: Thank you.

GROSS: Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of "The Virgin Suicides" which has
been adapted into a film. He spoke to us from the BBC studio in Berlin.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Review: Positive review of two new novels about China: "Becoming
Madam Mao," a fictional biography by Anchee Min, and the detective
novel, "Death of a Red Heroine"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Last summer, book critic Maureen Corrigan spent a few weeks in China. This
summer, she's paying off credit card bills and relying on the consolations of
fiction until she can make a return trip.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN (Critic):

China is inscrutable, a land of myths and shadows, double-talk and official
cover stories that change with the wind. Unless, you think me an ignorant
Westerner for saying that, I'm just paraphrasing the view of two wonderful new
novels about China, both written in English by Chinese who emigrated as adults
to the United States. Both these writers have also paid a high personal price
for the political cynicism that informs their novels.

Anchee Min was celebrated for her 1994 memoir "Red Azelea," which recounted
her childhood in Shanghai, her hardships on a Communist labor farm and the
strange twist of fortune that transformed her into a leading actress in the
propaganda films churned out Madam Mao Zedong's minions.

After Madam Mao was denounced for murdering her husband, one crime she didn't
commit, Min, who was regarded as one of her proteges, was banished once again
to the labor farm. She managed to come to the United States in 1984 with the
help of another actress, Joan Chen.

Min has written a poetic, fictional biography called "Becoming Madam Mao" that
fleshes out the picture of the woman known as the white-boned demon. In Min's
re-creation, it's a life story so lurid, so packed with ambition, it should
have already been made into a Madonna bio flick, a Chinese compliment to
"Evita."

Born in rural China to a concubine, the future Madam Mao rebelled as a child
against her mother's attempts to bind her feet. That mutinous spirit drove
her to Shanghai where she became a B-movie actress and opera singer and a
three-time loser in marriage.

According to this novel, she joined the Communist Party more out of career
aspirations than political convictions and in 1934 met and ensnared Mao
Zedong. The rest, as they say, is history, culminating in Madam Mao's own
fall from power and her imprisonment and suicide.

Madam Mao is a hard woman to keep company with, even for the space of this
engaging 300-page novel. But to Min's great credit as a writer, she humanizes
without sentimentalizing Madam Mao. To vary our view, Min alternates a
retrospective voice of history commentary with first-person narration which
gives us at least imaginatively a glimpse into Madam Mao's mind.

A proto-feminist, a monster, a relentless self-promoter who always saw herself
as a peacock among hens, a fool for love, a second-rate sensitive mind, Madam
Mao is made into all those things in this novel whose literary elegance is
provocatively at odds with its blood-drenched subject.

Madam Mao spent years trying to make it in show biz in Shanghai, the
fascinating city that's the setting for Qui Xiaolong's stupendous first novel,
a detective story called "Death of a Red Heroine." Qui was born there, became
a poet and translator of the works of W.B. Yates and T.S. Eliot, studied in
the United States and after Tiananmen decided it was too dangerous to return
to China.

Qui's detective, Chief Inspector Chen Cao of the Shanghai Police Bureau, is
also a poet in his spare time, a lover of the bourgeois verses of T.S. Eliot,
and what's more risky in contemporary China, a believer in poetic justice.
When the corpse of a strangled woman turns out to be that of a celebrated
model worker who's personal life, Cao discovers, was far from exemplary, Cao
bucks Communist cadre opposition to crack the case, or so he thinks.

What's so brilliant about this novel, besides its hard-boiled intricate plot
and suddenly developed characters, is its vivid picture of China in the 1990s
on the verge of an historic shift into capitalism. Entrepreneurs, Cao
observes, were springing up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain. On an
investigative trip into the countryside, Cao sees a peasant girl selling bowls
of tea by the road and he muses on the poetic possibilities of the scene. But
when the girl also turns out to be selling black-market computer discs, his
revery is broken. Cao himself is a tortured fellow, a guy who's enjoyed some
political perks and who now realizes the tragic impossibility of being a
dedicated Communist Party member and a dedicated police detective.

Two novels about China, both standouts. Which one do I recommend to readers
short of time who want to deepen their knowledge of the country? No contest.
"Death of a Red Heroine" may only be a humble detective novel in contrast to
the literary fiction of becoming Madam Mao, but it does what detective fiction
can do best: It captures the details, the grit of everyday life. As Chief
Inspector Cao learns, sometimes you can't think in categories, sometimes even
the lowly oyster of genre fiction produces a matchless pearl.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She
reviewed two new novels about China, "Becoming Madam Mao" and "Death of a Red
Heroine."

Coming up, jazz critic Kevin Whitehead reviews a new CD by Andrew Hill. This
is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Profile: New CD by pianist Andrew Hill, "Dusk"
TERRY GROSS, host:

Jazz pianist Andrew Hill is an illusive figure on several levels. For long
time, folks weren't even sure where he came from. Early on, he claimed to
have been born in Haiti, although he's really from Chicago. He's always
resisted categorizing as either mainstream or avant-garde since his music is
both lyrical and unpredictable. Periodically, he'll earn acclaim for some
good records and then all but vanish from the spotlight. His first new record
in almost 10 years is out now. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead says it was worth
the wait.

(Soundbite of music)

KEVIN WHITEHEAD (Jazz Critic):

Typical Andrew Hill. The unpredictability halts and surges in his timing and
ending you don't see coming. Such quirks can make it hard for other players
to join in. Hill's made some records where his side folk had to keep guessing
where his next beat would fall and sometimes guessed wrong.

But in the '90s, a number of younger players arrived who could follow his
unsignaled turns, maybe 'cause they came up listening to Andrew Hill records.
The five new musicians who joined him on his new CD are about a generation
younger.

(Soundbite of music)

WHITEHEAD: Andrew Hill with Marty Ehrlich and Greg Tardy on saxophones. On
trumpet is up-and-comer Ron Horton, who put out a nice CD of his own recently
called "Genious Envy." Andrew Hill's new CD on the Palmetto label, is called
"Dusk."

As much as Hill plays with timing and meter on his new record, that last piece
is in seven-eight time for example. He crams his CD with a lot of quietly,
catchy melodies.

(Soundbite of music)

WHITEHEAD: That's Scott Colley on bass. Andrew Hill looks for ways to
sidestep the usual jazz format of a theme followed by a string of solos
followed by the theme again. Hill might call for a solo before the theme has
been sounded or play the theme between solos or even in the middle of a solo
or change tempo when a theme repeats or write multiple sections for one piece.

A lot can happen in the space of a minute, as on "Bawl Square." It's a sort
of concerto for Billy Drummond(ph), a perfect drummer for Hill. He can bring
the rhythm to a full boil and keep his solo statements clear and focused.

(Soundbite of music)

WHITEHEAD: The three horns and three rhythm instrumentation of Andrew Hill's
sextet deliberately evokes his classic 1964 album, "Point of Departure," but
he doesn't revisit its sound. His new disk has its own flavor, sweet enough
to make converts of the uninitiated.

Andrew Hill is now in his early 60s, and the title "Dusk" may suggest he's
winding down but his music says otherwise. This season Hill's also on
saxophonist Greg Osby's CD, "The Invisible Hand," where the pianist's odd-ball
timing is even more dramatically displayed.

It is a good moment for Andrew Hill fans. His new CD feels less like "Dusk"
than the so-called magic hour just before it when indirect light bathes
everything in a warm glow.

GROSS: Kevin Whitehead is the author of "New Dutch Swing." He reviewed
"Dusk" by Andrew Hill.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.

(Credits)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.
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