Jeffrey Eugenides- "Early Music"

Jeffrey Eugenides is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Middlesex" and "The Virgin Suicides." "Virgin" is one of the best books I have ever read. Eugenides' style is lyrical, poetic, and musical. The book organically grew from a short story, and, coincidentally, both novels read like a short story collection. Although both contain fairly basic, linear plots, each section or chapter is so concise that they could stand alone as autonomous stories.

Eugenides often infuses his work with a dry sense of humor and an almost rhetorical narration. Take this example from the beginning of his short story "Early Music."

"As soon as he came in the front door, Rodney went straight to the music room. That was what he called it, wryly but not without some hope: the music room. It was a small, dogleg-shaped fourth bedroom that had been created when the building was cut up into apartments. It qualified as a music room because it contained his clavichord.

"There it stood on the unswept floor: Rodney’s clavichord. It was apple-green with gold trim and bore a scene of geometric gardens on the inside of its lifted lid. Modelled on the Bodechtel clavichords built in the seventeen-nineties, Rodney’s had come from the Early Music Store, in Edinburgh, three years ago. Still, resting there majestically in the dim light—it was winter in Chicago—the clavichord looked as though it had been waiting for Rodney to play it not only for the nine and a half hours since he’d left for work but for a couple of centuries at least."

The narration lends a fluidity to the phrases as if someone welcomes us into the music room- the repetitive short beats highlighted by the use of colons-- "music room" and "Rodney's clavichord"-- offer brief, fleeting moments of imagery, instead of lush, descriptive language. The dryness of the narration is wry, and often short, but never sarcastic.

The story is about Rodney-- a former Ph.D candidate-- and his attempts to find time to play his rare, expensive clavichord and his struggle to pay for it. A great story about lost ambition, music and family.

It's available at The New Yorker .