"He knew a lot about his grandparents - and perhaps he feels he's been endowed with abilities to go into people's heads who are long dead - but, to a certain extent, he's making it up"
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The line lands like a genial shrug at the most dangerous illusion in storytelling: that the novelist is some kind of licensed mind-reader of the dead. Eugenides gives us a character (or narrator) who has done the dutiful homework - “He knew a lot about his grandparents” - then swerves into the sly admission that research is not resurrection. That dash (“- and perhaps… -”) performs the very maneuver it describes: a quick, tempting leap into omniscience, immediately hedged, immediately doubted.
The phrase “endowed with abilities” mocks the mystique of inherited insight. It sounds almost supernatural, like a family gift passed down with the china. Eugenides, a writer fascinated by genealogy, identity, and the stories families tell to make themselves coherent, punctures that fantasy with “to a certain extent,” a bureaucratic little qualifier that drains the glamour from the claim. Then comes the blunt verdict: “he’s making it up.” Not “inventing,” not “imagining,” but the colloquial phrase we use for exaggeration, for bullshit, for a story told too confidently.
The subtext is a permission slip and a warning. Family history invites narrative certainty - the desire to turn fragments into fate, to explain yourself by narrating your ancestors as if you were there. Eugenides insists on the ethical tension: you can honor the past with attention and still distort it with narrative need. The sentence is a miniature manifesto for literary realism: the truth is in the attempt, not in the pretense of perfect access.
The phrase “endowed with abilities” mocks the mystique of inherited insight. It sounds almost supernatural, like a family gift passed down with the china. Eugenides, a writer fascinated by genealogy, identity, and the stories families tell to make themselves coherent, punctures that fantasy with “to a certain extent,” a bureaucratic little qualifier that drains the glamour from the claim. Then comes the blunt verdict: “he’s making it up.” Not “inventing,” not “imagining,” but the colloquial phrase we use for exaggeration, for bullshit, for a story told too confidently.
The subtext is a permission slip and a warning. Family history invites narrative certainty - the desire to turn fragments into fate, to explain yourself by narrating your ancestors as if you were there. Eugenides insists on the ethical tension: you can honor the past with attention and still distort it with narrative need. The sentence is a miniature manifesto for literary realism: the truth is in the attempt, not in the pretense of perfect access.
Quote Details
| Topic | Grandparents |
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