Nov 1, 2011 at the Free Library of Philadelphia

He was introduced by his freshman college roommate from Brown (they started there in 1978; the plot of The Marriage Plot is set in 1982, as that class of students is graduating).  He didn’t know that Andy, his old roommate, was going to be introducing him.  He said that a passage of the novel in which two roommates don’t speak for many months was inspired by Andy, but that they were going to go out for a drink afterwards.

He read the part of the novel directly leading up to Leonard and Madeleine’s breakup, which included not one but two sex scenes, one of which I thought was uncomfortable.

The audience was on the old side, almost entirely white.  There was a lot of tittering and laughing, even at parts that weren’t funny.

The second question of the Q&A session asked if the character of Mitchell (the third point in the novel’s love triangle) was more autobiographical than the others.  This was as close as the questions got to the DFW controversy.  He said that he puts a lot of himself into all of his characters, including Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard, though Mitchell is perhaps the most direct, because that character is Greek, from Michigan and travels to India to work at Mother Teresa’s orphanage, as he did.  But he also said that none of the major events of the book actually happened, and that the parts that were the most autobiographical were the most difficult to write, because it’s hard to edit yourself when you’re remembering.

He said that when he’s constructing a character, he first imagines a general outline of what they’re like.  Then him imbues it with qualities from everyone he knows that seem to fit.  Finally, he fills in the character with the perspectives and experiences of his own that are appropriate.

I believe that.  I don’t know, of course, but I think he just did a clumsy job of incorporating a bunch of DFW’s qualities (and at least one quotation) into Leonard, and is probably put off and possibly embarrassed that so many people noticed.  That said, the novel is a marriage novel.  I’m about halfway through.  If, at the end of it, the heroine chooses the Eugenides character over the DFW character, thus symbolically choosing pleasurable narrative over deconstructionist post-modernism, well, forget it.

He was very thin — he must either run or bicycle (I wonder which one); 50-year-old men don’t stay in that kind of shape without a lot of cardio — and very well-dressed.  He was a little goofy, and little “dad embarassing.”  At the book signing table, he was friendly and open, but not chatty.

He’s a hard-working writer.  Responding to a question about process, he said he writes from the early morning until dinnertime every day when he’s working on a novel, aiming to produce at least 800 decent words a day, a little more than two pages.  He is certainly very intelligent, but didn’t have the otherworldly quality that writers sometimes have.  He came from the Midwest, went to an Ivy League school, worked really hard and became a successful novelist.  He said pretty candidly that he thought he didn’t have a lot to offer the Princeton writing students (freshmen and sophomores) in his workshop, that they were so intelligent and creative that they thought of most things he might say about the student writing they were critiquing.