There is bad and good news about Fresh Complaint. The bad news is that there’s nothing especially intense or inventive here, no sign that short fiction is the fertile row Eugenides should have been hoeing all along. The good news is how solid these stories are anyway. Two or three are excellent; none are total misses. Line by line, paragraph by paragraph, Eugenides writes like a man who is enjoying himself. The feeling is contagious ... Many of Eugenides’s short stories are about mental self-mutilation. He writes with elegiac wit about middle-class, mostly educated men and women whose lives have begun to grind them down ... This book delivers many small corkscrews of feeling. For all of its interest in failure and misbehavior, it is threaded with a strong moral sensibility. Eugenides’s miserable bipeds want to behave well but there are so many obstacles in their way ... Eugenides has written life-altering books of that sort, and Fresh Complaint isn’t one of them. But its charm and insight are real, and formidable.
Each story includes the year it was written at the end, instructively calling attention to the development of Eugenides' approaches and themes across the decades. This collection contains flashes of what makes his longer work a pleasure to read — fraught situations, keenly observed behaviors, and senses of complicated humor and empathy — but on the whole, it feels uneven ... In the strongest stories, particularly 'Timeshare' and 'Capricious Gardens,' Eugenides comes across as bemused by — but not mocking or contemptuous of — his characters. In too many others, his tone condescends and dismisses ... One regrets this collection's lack of consistency, but it is worth a read as one waits for Eugenides' next novel.
...[an] excellent short story collection ... in each Eugenides deploys his pronounced gifts for comedy and characterisation at the same time as he builds an overwhelming atmosphere of suffocation. It is hard to say exactly why money exerts such fascination for the author. It can efficiently propel a story towards crisis, of course, but beyond that it emerges from these pages as the central subject of American life, driving the country but also infecting its citizens with a kind of mania.
Eugenides excels at penetrating — and gently mocking — the insider lingo of academics. He can make a realistic setting seem deliciously weird, and the highlights in these stories often feature simultaneously funny and plaintive images that encourage our appreciation for 'the pleasant absurdity of America' ... the highly unusual situations and settings featured in these tales feel more true to his vision than the ones chronicling more typical dissatisfactions: the divorces, infidelities and dashed hopes that turn up in many an American writer’s New Yorker magazine story. Although the writing is undeniably skillful, Eugenides isn’t at his best when focusing on 'lives of quiet desperation' ... A 'fresh complaint' is the legal term for a report of a sexual assault to a third party soon after it happens, which can help to corroborate the victim’s claim. The best stories in this collection offer a sophisticated riff on that concept. They show how memory distorts our view of our own pasts, and how blind we are to the trajectory of futures, especially as we act impulsively.
Fresh Complaint acts as a sort of Eugenides sampler, one that shows off both his enormous gifts as a prose stylist and the tendency toward myopia — especially with regard to women — that can plague his writing ... there’s an ever-present danger that Eugenides’s writing may step over the fine line between commenting on the objectification of women and just straight up doing some objectifying of its own. Fresh Complaint is certainly not exempt from that danger ... generally, Eugenides is very good at writing his unpleasant men behaving badly. His stories are beautifully crafted, each with a distinctive, elegant voice and a gut punch of a closing line. They’re just long enough to give the reader a sense of how unpleasant these men truly are, without getting oppressive in the way that a novel-length book centered on one of these men might. But often, there’s a little frisson of illicit pleasure in Eugenides’s stories at the idea of doing something terrible to a woman, a little can-you-believe-the-son-of-a-bitch-actually-did-it ... while I don’t mean to suggest that reading and enjoying these moments is in any way immoral or wrong, if you are a woman who is tired of reading about women being sexually victimized, the overwhelming themes of Fresh Complaint might give you pause ... Eugenides is very, very good at creating other lives into which his readers can plunge. But what Fresh Complaint demonstrates is that he’s not always very good at making those lives welcoming to women.
By Eugenides’s own admission, [the stories] make ‘a very mixed bag’ As with his novels, the stories are not all riffs on the same theme or told in the same voice. Still, to better adumbrate Eugenides’s preoccupations, we can crudely lump them into three categories … Yet the common thread between the most successful entries in this collection is not thematic, but in the attention paid to character (We can also peg the shortcomings of a story like ‘Timeshare’ as shortcomings of character: the story only gives us a muzzy picture of who the narrator is) … If Jeffrey Eugenides’s most impressive achievement is the variety of his voices, those voices are rooted in characters, and Fresh Complaint showcases the vast breadth of humanity its author can call to life.
Despite the title Fresh Complaint, the stories within this new short story collection are as stale as airplane cabin air. Three were written after the turn of the millennium, and the remaining five in the previous century. Regardless of their date of birth, these stories belie unconditional lack of respect for characterization, focus, and detail ... It’s no crime to be a more proficient novelist than a capable short story writer. Middlesex is rightly heralded for its intricacy, warmth, and attention to detail. The Virgin Suicides captivated audiences on page and screen alike for its dreamy, haunting portrait of a family of girls who kill themselves, one by one. But starting with The Marriage Plot, Eugenides has another book to add to the loss column with Fresh Complaint.
Eugenides has always been a sharp and exacting writer, and nearly every one of the stories in this collection is teachable, a model of its own kind of Swiss-clock craftsmanship … Still, teachability may be the second-highest praise one can give a story; the very best short stories are profoundly unteachable, coming to a reader from a place beyond obvious craft...Of the 10 stories in Fresh Complaint, two have reverberated this way in my mind in the month since I first read the book, a pretty good score for any collection of short fiction … The stories in Fresh Complaint give the impression that they fell, already ripe, into Jeffrey Eugenides’s hands. What a shame, when we know how far he can stretch.
This book feels like a collection of more minor works—ones that relate to the central oeuvre, but are more of a testing-ground than a completed edifice ... These stories are certainly less satisfying than the novels. But they are unsatisfactory for the reason that they are appealing. They gesture to tapestries of narrative that exist 'off-screen,' so to speak; they unsettle and gesture to bigger worlds without cohering. That lack of coherence makes the characters of Fresh Complaint resemble the book which they live inside. Nothing falls together the way that we expect from an ambitious novelist. Instead, like people whose lives have not gone the way that they had hoped, these stories hang in an uneasy tension. But for that reason they offer quite a new Eugenides to his readers. This version of him is a little less masterful and a little more inventive, but very welcome nonetheless.
Fresh Complaint, Eugenides’ first collection of short stories, is filled with characters who are buffeted and broken — perhaps irreparably. Some take wrong turns or hit dead ends. Some are just victims of bad luck. Most try to bounce back, but many find the damage already done. Friendships unravel and relationships founder; confidence is knocked and sanity is threatened … Eugenides’ tales are rich in comedy and compassion: If we aren’t laughing at one person mired in absurdity, we are championing another facing up to adversity. Not all characters earn our sympathy, but their creator deserves our admiration, for almost every story comprises a neatly constructed narrative on which hang engaging predicaments, surprise outcomes and Eugenides’ special brand of wit and wisdom … Time and again, and with pathos and pungency, Eugenides ensures a character’s loss is the reader’s gain.
The stories in this collection, which were written over the past 30 years, take on the disappointment of modern life, with all its self-inflicted failures and moral compromises … Mr. Eugenides seems to stick a dead key in each of these stories, making them intentionally flat or anticlimactic. This can result in some fine straight-faced comedy, particularly in ‘Baster,’ about a middle-aged woman on an extremely public search for high-quality sperm. But many of the stories read like early drafts for the author’s novels … ‘Great Experiment’ is one of the few stories here that feel satisfyingly complete.
Eugenides’ first story collection is gifted with the strong voices and luminous prose his novels are known for ... Stories probe aging and agency, sex and death, with Eugenides’ trademark wit and deadpan grace. Cunning, comic, and clueless characters hatch plans to restore their unfairly sapped potential and deal with the results—some successful, some unanticipated, some unsavory—while Eugenides captures the places they’re in, both physical and metaphorical, with precision. Early on, old friends wonder, 'What was it about complaining that felt so good?' Readers will enjoy lamenting that this complete and utterly human collection must, after all, end.
These ten stories, written over nearly 30 years, showcase his ability to write convincing female characters, his sensitivity to spouses and artists under duress, and his compassion for people who disappoint themselves as much as each other ... While not all the stories are memorable, there isn't a dud in this generally solid collection ... Although Eugenides' stories are more traditional than edgy, the absorbing fiction in Fresh Complaint renders us — like the 88-year-old dementia sufferer comforted by the vaguely familiar Inuit tale in the opening story — freshly grateful for what literature can do: 'the self-forgetfulness, the diving and plunging into other lives.'
It’s remarkable to see how consistently pointed Eugenides’s prose, humor and observational acuity have been over the years. Throw in his willingness to tackle sticky issues at every opportunity, and you have a heady treat ... 'Baster' [is] a comic masterpiece ... Eugenides is always venturesome in the subjects he takes on, nowhere more so than in 'Fresh Complaint,' where an Indian-American teenage girl’s resistance to an arranged marriage to a boy from Kolkata is one of the starting points. Prakrti’s scheme for foiling her parents’ plan draws an unsuspecting middle-aged university lecturer into scandal and marital disarray. The story has parallels with David Mamet’s 'Oleanna' but with cultural divides complicating the sexual politics in fascinating ways. Where Mamet’s play verges on misogynistic, Eugenides’ tale has a deeper, aching sympathy for both parties. Eugenides publishes sparingly: just three novels and these 10 stories over 28 years. But he makes each one count.
The stories are sound from a craft perspective, and most were previously published in prestigious literary magazines. However, many of these stories have not aged particularly well, begging the question, why put them out into the world now? … The stories that make up Fresh Complaint resemble a row of uniform houses lining a suburban cul-de-sac — they have individual merits upon close inspection, but are unmemorable when piled together … On paper, Fresh Complaint is a solid collection of short stories written over the successful career of a prominent American writer. But right now, it feels out of place and time.
Eugenides seems most comfortable when he can write his stories with irony and a detached, sophisticated humor. He is thoroughly cosmopolitan, and he can be very funny. This style is on full and effective display in ‘Capricious Gardens,’ but several of the other stories are deliberately dark, their characters devoid of hope or humor … Fresh Complaint is chockfull of good things: interesting characters, clever twists, lively scenes.
The book's stories present an array of flawed, complicated characters — people who are basically good and well-meaning but easily led into bad behavior … The men in these stories are not heroes. They eye younger women, steal from employers, go too easy on themselves. They struggle with money, peering into wealthier worlds they can't access … Women have prominent roles in these stories: the hard-hearted wife, the teenage object of desire, the single 40-year-old who decides she wants a baby and throws an insemination party. But only one story is written from a woman's perspective — and it is one of the best.
Most of the characters here struggle to defeat adversity, but, alas, Mr. Eugenides also struggles in the earlier works to achieve his effects … Much of the prose reads like that of a young author trying too hard to be clever … Yet the book also contains many dazzling works, among them ‘Find the Bad Guy,’ a 2013 story that paints a devastating portrait of a crumbling marriage between a Texas radio consultant and the Bavarian woman who married him to get a green card; and ‘Early Music,’ about a frustrated musician avoiding the collections people who want the money for a clavichord he purchased in Edinburgh many years earlier. The book’s best stories are the last.
His fans may feel short-changed: Eugenides is a skilful handler of tangled plot lines and character study, qualities that are by necessity sacrificed in the deftly drawn sketches here ... ['Complainers'] would make a compelling first chapter of a novel; yet the relationship comes to a hastily drawn conclusion: Della’s condition inevitably worsens, and Cathy departs the scene abruptly. As with some of the stories that follow, we are left with an evocative, minor-chord ending, rueful in tone but ultimately a little unsatisfying ... Eugenides broadens his range in the final story, written this year, that gives the collection its title.
...the collection throughout is marked by a rich wit, an eye for detail, and a sense of the absurd ... Eugenides never holds up his characters for outright mockery, and the two fine new stories that bookend the collection gracefully navigate darker territory: 'Complainers' is narrated by a woman confronting her longtime friend’s dementia, and Fresh Complaint turns on a young Indian-American woman’s provocative scheme to escape an arranged marriage. We humans are well-meaning folk, Eugenides means to say, but life tends to force us into bad behavior. Sprightly or serious, Eugenides consistently writes about complex lives with depth and compassion.
The title story is an adroit and moving exploration of an Indian-American teenager’s desperate attempts to avoid an arranged marriage. 'The Great Experiment' is the collection’s highlight ... The collection is uneven, but even the weakest story is never boring, and Eugenides’s prodigious abilities are showcased throughout.
