Fresh Complaint
Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
These are strange times for fiction written about terrible men. Fresh Complaint is a collection of short stories written over the past twenty-two years by Jeffrey Eugenides, author of the much-loved The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, and the somewhat-less-loved The Marriage Plot. Fresh Complaint arrives with perfect timing, published during a networked backlash against our culture’s patriarchal tendencies. It features a cast of schemers, embezzlers and adulterers, men who feel, sometimes understandably, hard done by America and capitalism and the world, and whose frustrations drive them to clumsy revenge.
Neither squeamish nor overbearingly earthy, Eugenides has a gift for describing the fallible. Many of his stories open on a precipice; we meet men who are hunted by debt-collectors and ex-wives, men in exile, men standing in the garden of what was once their family home. While they appear less frequently, there are also women who match their male counterparts for fecklessness. There’s the teenage girl who engineers her own statutory rape in order to get out of an arranged marriage, and the sperm-harvester of ‘Baster’, who throws a party to cajole male friends into ejaculating into a jar.
Their transgressions, however, are minor compared to those of the male characters. There is neither hope nor entertainment to be found in the men of Fresh Complaint, and the pathos, tenderness and gravity with which Eugenides’ other works treat everyday tragedy is absent in these depictions of the mundane totems of American adulthood. If the recent internet-led purge has revealed anything, it’s that predatory male behaviour is positively uninteresting and banal.
Words – Roisin Kiberd
