"Middlesex" and "Midnight's Children"

jsf You allude, many times in Middlesex, to national epics, particularly Greek ones, of course. It seems to me that our modern epics?-Ulysses, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight's Children?-have had their greatest influence outside the countries of their origin. Am I wrong in sensing some ambition on your part to write a Greek epic for an American audience?
je I've always wanted to write a big comic epic. The books you mention are books I loved in my late teens and early twenties, and back in those days I dreamed of trying my hand at the same thing. I thought I'd better give it a go before I got too old, because I knew it would be physically and intellectually draining. And because the comic spirit might dissipate with age. I never set out to write a "Greek-American" epic. At first I just wanted to write a fictional memoir of a hermaphrodite. This summoned other literary hermaphrodites, like Tiresias. Hermaphroditism led to classicism. Classicism led to Hellenism. And Hellenism led to my family. I used my Greek ancestry because it worked in the story I wanted to tell, not the other way around. But with a name like Eugenides, what do you expect?

jsf Baklava?
je I had that coming.

jsf Roth and Rushdie seem to be the two poles of your influence. Do you feel that way?
je One review of Middlesex compared it to the early novels of Saul Bellow. Which was fine by me. (But can you imagine Saul Bellow writing about a hermaphrodite?) I bring this up because my supposed influences are always changing. When The Virgin Suicides came out, I was accused, in England, of being too influenced by Salinger, especially by Franny and Zooey. There was only one thing wrong with that?-I hadn't read Franny and Zooey at the time.

Literary influence is like genetics, too. Rushdie got some of his fireworks from Günter Grass and Gabriel García Márquez. García Márquez got things from Kafka and Faulkner. So, with Middlesex, you could say I inherited traits from all these ancestors, not to mention good old Homer. But some of my stuff bears no relation to these writers. Different gene pool entirely.

Influence isn't just a matter of copying someone or learning his or her tricks. You get influenced by writers whose work gives you hints about your own abilities and inclinations. Being influenced is largely a process of self-discovery. What you have to do is put all your influences into the blender and arrive at your own style and vision.[/i] That's the way it happens in music?-you put a sitar in a rock song and you get a new sound. It's hybridization again. Hybrid vigor. It operates in art, too. The idea that a writer is a born genius, endowed with blazing originality, is mostly a myth, I think. You have to work at your originality. You create it; it doesn't create you. If I look at the writers who have influenced me, I see that many things about their lives accord with my own. Take Roth, for instance. He grew up in Newark, a town not so different from Detroit. He was the son of middle-class American parents and the grandson of grandparents with funny accents. From this hardworking but hardly culturally elevated milieu he went on to study English and become a good college boy. Now take Rushdie. He came from exotic origins, Bombay, (exotic to the English, anyway) and went to Cambridge. With both these writers, there is belonging and not belonging. In my own case, I was sent to a private prep school in Grosse Pointe, a place that made me more aware of my supposed "ethnicity" than I had been in public school. This marked me. I think it's no surprise that I might be influenced by a writer like Roth who writes very much about being American but also about being Jewish. I also happen to admire his books.

But I don't want to take this similarity business too far. I love Henry James but I'm not much like him. Maybe that's the Grosse Pointe in me, though. After all, I went to black-tie affairs when I was 16. We smoked pot behind the bushes in our tuxedos. Very Jamesian.