Style of Writing: Jeffrey Eugenides
The Virgin Suicides is unique in that its narrative voice is first-person plural: “we” rather than “I”. The “we” is a group of teenage boys who live in the same neighborhood as the Lisbons and who as adults still try to comprehend the suicide. Several of the boys are mentioned by name, but the narration never slips into first-person singular and the speaker's identity remains unclear. Jeffrey Eugenides' unique style is characterized by a delight in the nonsensicalness of the humdrum, an eye for eccentricity and fastidiousness, a deliberate but gorgeous lyrical style, and dark humor.
The style of Middlesex is written in the form of a memoir, and switches between the first and the third person in a couple of different spots. To add some humor, the third person narratives illustrate Cal's estrangement from Calliope: When he refers to her in the third person, he is identifying her as someone other than him. The novel does seems to be overly wordy. It’s ponderous and the main story (that of Cal) doesn’t really start to pick up until halfway through the book. As said by Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly “The writing itself is also about mixing things up, grafting flights of descriptive fancy with hunks of conversational dialogue, pausing briefly to sketch passing characters or explain a bit of a bygone world.”
In The Marriage Plot, Eugenides plays with the concept of modern novels not being allowed to be "about" anything. The Marriage Plot is in some ways not clearly about anything and in some ways a revamping of the novels the character Madeleine loves -- romantic, Victorian stories that are driven by marriage. Through the three main characters (Madeleine, Leonard, Mitchell), Eugenides explores many other topics -- religion, feminism, academia, class. The story is large, even though the plot is small.