The novelist and short-story writer Jeffrey Eugenides is known for his humorous and deeply affecting sketches of unconventional encounters and characters. Since 1996, Eugenides has contributed sixteen pieces to The New Yorker, primarily fiction. He's the author of four books, including the best-selling "The Virgin Suicides," which the director Sofia Coppola adapted into her first feature film, and "Middlesex," which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, in 2003. "The Virgin Suicides," with its evocative depiction of female adolescence, influenced an entire generation of readers, and the film helped launch Coppola and Kirsten Dunst's lengthy artistic collaboration. In 1996, Eugenides made his New Yorker début with "Baster," a short story about a middle-aged woman's unorthodox plan to get pregnant. (The 2010 comedy "The Switch," starring Jennifer Aniston and Jason Bateman, was partly inspired by Eugenides's story.) Tomasina, the heroine, has reached a certain age without a partner. "The finest soldiers had quit the field," Eugenides writes. "What was left was a ragtag gang of adulterers and losers, hit-and-run types, village-burners. Tomasina had to give up the idea of meeting someone she could spend her life with. Instead, she had to give birth to someone who would spend life with her." Tomasina soon lands on an idea inspired by a comic recipe incorporating a turkey baster—and, of course, a certain ingredient she can't supply herself. The narrator, a man named Wally, is an old boyfriend of Tomasina's, and it gradually becomes apparent that he may not be the most reliable—or impartial—of narrators. One of the subversive elements of Eugenides's tale is that while Tomasina is ostensibly objectifying the men who could serve as sperm donors, Wally is busy objectifying Tomasina, in ways both large and small. It's a perverse comedy about relationships between men and women, the complexities of reproduction, and, most significantly, our tendency to deceive ourselves about our latent needs and desires. Eugenides is a skilled chamberlain of eccentric and even unsympathetic characters, and the drollery of his narrative never overshadows its moments of discomfort and unease. As the plot progresses, a tale ostensibly about one woman's obsession with her future is expertly transfigured into a darkly humorous account of a man's obsession with his past—and, ultimately, his compulsion for control.
—Erin Overbey, archive editor
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