Life Is Messier Than Literature, Right?

style="overflow: hidden; color: #000000; background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">Jeffrey Eugenides, a Pulitzer Prize-winner for 2002â??s richly rewarding Middlesex, sets his latest novel on a university campus at the beginning of the 1980s, an infernally confusing place and time for young hearts and minds. The momentous social upheavals of the previous two decades weighed heavily on studentsâ?? innocent sensibilities. They longed to fall in love but the rules of sexual relationships were in furious ferment. They wanted to study the classics of literature but the texts they loved were being clinically dismantled by opaque critical theorists with crazed political agendas. Nothing seemed to make sense. And when everything is up for grabs, it is hard to grab on to any one thing.