Underwhelmed by Fresh Complaint

by Rachel Miller 

The first story in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Fresh Complaint, “Complainers,” ends with Della alone, forgetting herself and her life, while looking out into the snow. All she has left is what is outside. As she stares out of the window, Della’s exposure to nature helps her to see who she is, what she is surrounded by, and what she feels she needs during the end of her life. Della sees the snow as her own brain, and she is no longer trapped inside of her deteriorating mind because the environment around her has made everything clear.

This is one story in the collection written over Eugenides’s writing career between 1978 and 2017. Because of the large time frame of the collection, the topics, plot, and quality of the stories are largely independent of the others. Some of the stories were more thought out and organized, while others were more random and felt like less effort was put into the writing, and because of the separation between all of the stories there is no continuous flow while reading the whole collection. While reading a novel per week in our English class: Recently Released: Reading and Reviewing Contemporary Fiction, I became accustomed to the clearer introduction of characters and more thought out plot points of longer works, and after reading my first ever short story collection after full-length novels, I was not able to connect to Eugenides’ stories. They were bland, and Eugenides did not take enough time and care to build out his characters.

The only thing holding the collection together is a loose theme of showing how nature affects or represents the characters. The characters have different experiences with the environments around them and have their own realizations about their lives. One example of this is seen with Della in “Complainers,” and it continues throughout the rest of Eugenides’ writing.

In “Air Mail”,  a man named Mitchell is sick during his travels to a foreign country, but he insists on not getting a treatment and instead fasting. As he becomes more sick, he is enlightened by his weakness. The story ends with Mitchell out in the ocean seeing the moon, where he feels that he is part of nature and the environment around him. Eugenides writes, “The strange thing was that here, in the hut, verifiably sick, Mitchell had never felt so good, so tranquil, or so brilliant in his life. He felt secure and watched over in a way he couldn’t explain.” His final moment of understanding happens as he floats in the ocean: “He lay undulating in the warm water, observing the correspondence of moonlight and ringing, how they increased and decreased together. After a while, he began to be aware that he, too, was like that.” 

Another example of Eugenides’s use of nature to help his characters gain a greater meaning about themselves is in “Capricious Gardens”. Malcolm arrives at Sean’s house not knowing where his life is heading or what his purpose is, so Sean has him go into the garden to help get dinner ready. As the night goes on, Malcolm is given an understanding by the artichokes and by his time in the garden. Malcolm “Picked up the last few artichokes Annie had been unable to carry. He put them against his cheek to feel how cool they were. As he did this, he was overcome by a feeling he recognized from his undergraduate days when he had first met Sean, a feeling of the beauty of the world and, along with this, his duty, his destiny, to apprehend it, so that it would not go unnoticed before it passed away.” Before his experience in the garden, Malcolm is lost; his last home was showing up at Sean’s house, and after spending time picking artichokes outside, he finally understands who he is.

In “Complainers,” we hear about Cathy, Della’s friend, and her husband, Clark’s relationship: “She has never known who Clark is. Theirs is a marriage devoid of intimacy." This representation of Cathy and Clark’s marriage mirrors the relationship that the reader is given with the characters. There is no access point given to the reader to allow them to relate to the characters, and I was not able to connect to the characters because of the lack of depth that they were given. The only thing I was able to cling on to throughout the stories was how nature was used as a device to help the characters understand who they are and to recognize their purposes.