So I says to Joyce, I says...

On Wednesday night I went to see Jeffrey Eugenides read from his new book THE MARRIAGE PLOT at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. It was the most crowded reading I had been to in months, probably since Jonathan Franzen last year, but that was at a ginormous Barnes & Noble, not a storefront. There was an expectant crackle in the air already when I arrived, with 20 minutes to go, and the store looked full though it wasn't yet. 

The staff had turned off the air conditioning so that we could hear over the noise. I was crammed next to a display featuring a book on crafts you can make out of cat hair (true story), by the register; I couldn't even see the top of Eugenides' head. A store employee would periodically sweep the people in front of me toward the back of the store, where they would have been facing bookshelves instead of the windows; then more people would filter in, and would be swept back as well.

Jeffrey Eugenides is balding in a circular, cartoon way, like my father. When we went up for the signing afterward he was wearing a white shirt printed with tiny purple and coral flowers and off his right elbow there was one half-empty Brooklyn Brewery beer, and another resting in what used to be ice in a plastic pitcher. He said he likes going on tour, joking about how his slow publishing schedule (3 novels in 3 decades) makes this easy on his readers; but he had been talking to Joyce Carol Oates who attempted to dissuade him from going at all. He didn't do a Q&A, although I think many of us in the audience would gladly have stood around to hear more. Then again, we might have been subjected to questions like "What's your secret to channeling the female perspective?"

After meeting him I believe he would be the kind of man to laugh about getting punched in the face by a disgruntled train passenger, but I could be wrong. 

The title of THE MARRIAGE PLOT is a palimpsest; the student Madeleine, an English major becoming infatuated with (and to the lines of) Roland Barthes in the newly created semiotics department, has written her senior thesis on the 19th- and early 20th-century novels (I think she locates the end of the genre around the time of SISTER CARRIE but I could be wrong) and refers to it as being about "the marriage plot," but its significance doesn't stop with her coursework. When I was reading it on the subway (its title bearing an elegant wedding ring that, on closer examination, is a Mobius strip) I wondered if people thought it was a self-help book, or a scholarly text along the lines of SEX AT DAWN or MARRIAGE: A HISTORY.

After looking for it at 3 bookstores on Monday, the day before it was published (begrudging kudos for not breaking the embargo), I purchased the book on Tuesday morning at a Hudson News in O'Hare Airport in Chicago -- it was the first time I had ever bought a hardcover at the airport, a gesture I associate with men in business class zipping down to Dallas for the day. I was flying JetBlue, an airline that doesn't have a business class. It was a little indulgent but I had my head down reading all the way back to New York, and then through Queens back to Brooklyn.