Eugenides writes with such compelling, darkly humorous, eerily beautiful, and unique attention to detail it’s hard to imagine that he didn’t live this story. A clever, hilarious, tragic, and condemning portrait 70s suburban America and society at large reacts to mental illness and suicide. The unique narrative framing makes the book an extremely powerful commentary on the obsessive and dehumanizing way young (and old) men view women. 
Eugenides’ prose finds abstract beauty in the unnoticed details of the mundane. It’s haunting, romantic and incisive.