Great Experiment by Jeffrey Eugenides, 2008
The magic trick:
Setting one man’s struggle against an American crisis
Happy Fourth of July. What a country we live in here at SSMT HQ.
Yikes.
“Great Experiment” seems a fitting way to celebrate today.
It’s a long-ish story, but Eugenides keeps the pages turning with his winning audience-friendly style.
Here, “Great Experiment” refers to Alexis de Toqueville’s famous observations during his 1830s visit and subsequent book. In the story, it also is the name of the publishing imprint that employs our hero.
Our hero is well-educated but not necessarily well-paid. His middle-class life in the Chicago suburbs with his wife and children is not coming as easily as it might have for his parents’ generation.
The story is not subtle on this point. America is broken. (Again, this falls into the accidental genre of political criticism from the George W. Bush era that reads as laughably naïve in 2025.) The great experiment is failing. The story couldn’t be more clear about this. As a result, our protagonist’s struggle to figure out the best way forward is a struggle against the American way of life itself.
And that’s quite a trick on Eugenides’s part.
The selection:
Jimmy wanted to call the little book “The Pocket Democracy.” After his initial inspiration, he’d handed off the project to Kendall. At first, Kendall had tried to read the book straight through, but now he skipped around in Volumes I and II. Lots of parts were unspeakably boring: methodologies of American jurisprudence, examinations of the American system of townships. Jimmy was interested only in the prescient bits. “Democracy in America” was like the stories parents told their grown children about their toddler days, recalling early signs of business acumen or religious inclination, describing speech impediments that had long ago disappeared. It was curious to read a Frenchman writing about America when America was small, unthreatening, and admirable, when it was still something underappreciated that the French could claim as their own and champion, like serial music or the novels of John Fante.
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