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Jeffrey Eugenides just wants his clothes back.

Early last month, Eugenides, his wife Karen and their eight-year-old daughter relocated to the leafy academic enclave of Princeton from Chicago, where they'd been living for the last three years. Unfortunately, until they get themselves organized enough to buy a house and move in, all of their worldly possessions are marooned in storage: their furniture, their books, their wardrobe. This normally might be all right - it's summer, and he doesn't begin teaching creative writing to Princeton grad students until September - but Eugenides is appearing this month at the Salzburg Festival in Vienna to read one of his short stories, and he very well might be reduced to wearing a golf shirt and khakis. Worse, since the story is about a failed scholar of early music, the festival has arranged for his reading to be accompanied by a clavichordist who will, no doubt, be properly attired. "I don't know what I'm going to do," he sighs, a hint of comic anxiety creeping into his voice. "I hear they're formal, the Austrians."

Really, the clothes are the least of his problems. He's got a novel in progress and a handful of short stories that are nipping at his heels, but he's having trouble settling in. "It's difficult to just show up here and start writing," he says, sipping a latte in a noisy independent coffee shop off the town's sleepy main drag. "I need a little more stability to get back on track here. When I don't write, I get depressed."

You'd think he'd be pretty high these days. In June, Middlesex, his acclaimed novel of gender identity and 20th-century America, which had already won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, was named the summer pick of Oprah's Book Club. The paperback reissue immediately vaulted onto the bestseller lists in the U.S. (though not, strangely, in Canada), helping to ease whatever pecuniary concerns Eugenides might have over the fact that his next novel is still some years away.

But even financial comfort carries discomforts. At 47, Eugenides is finally taking a bold step into middle age by buying his first house in the suburbs. After the intense urban living of Chicago and Berlin (and Brooklyn before that, which he, his wife and then-eight-month-old daughter fled because their rent was skyrocketing), Princeton's sleepy verdant expanse presents some challenges.

One homestead he and his wife considered, a non-working farm, has a barn where bats have taken up residence. "There's all this guano, and it turns out guano's quite dangerous and you have to get it removed professionally by these guys that are almost in hazmat outfits, because a fungus can grow on it, so it's actually something you wouldn't want your kid to encounter." There's the lawn. "A zone of anxiety. We don't even have one yet but as we look at these houses, I look at the lawn and think: What is breeding in there? I keep meeting people who've gotten Lyme disease." Then of course there are the property taxes, which in Princeton can run you about $30,000 (U.S.) a year. And insurance. "I'm dying for an apartment in Manhattan," Eugenides chuckles. "You can deal with the noise, you know what you're dealing with. Not guano."

He also looked at a house next door to the famously prolific Joyce Carol Oates. "I thought: Could I live next to her? I'll hear the typewriter going all the time." He laughs. "Princeton now has the fastest and the slowest writers in America."

Eugenides averages about nine years for every novel, so it's just as well his books have long shelf lives. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, came out in 1993 and got a nice bump when the writer-director Sophia Coppola adapted it for her 1999 feature film debut. Middlesex may have yet another go-round in a few years time if it, too, is adapted for the screen. HBO has the miniseries rights. For a while, the team behind the adaptation of Angels in America, playwright Tony Kushner and director Mike Nichols, were attached to the project.

Like Kushner's play, which spanned American history from the McCarthy witch hunts of the 1950s to the AIDS crisis of the 1980s (and also dealt with long-buried secrets and sexual confusion), Middlesex is both an epic story of America and an intimate personal narrative. Eugenides gives us Calliope Stephanides, a third-generation Greek-American with a rare genetic flaw. Raised as a girl, Callie discovers at age 14 that she possesses undescended testicles (which helps explain her sexual desire for girls), and makes the decision to live as a male.

While narrating his own story, Cal (as he is now known, at age 41), also provides a rich and bittersweet family history that reaches back to a tiny Greek village. His grandparents - fatefully, a brother and sister - leave their mountain home just in time to witness the Great Fire of Smyrna before securing safe passage to the New World. Settling in Detroit, they hide their blood relation, living as husband and wife and spawning a modern American family that enjoys the prosperity of the post-Second World War era before enduring the social and political upheaval of the 1960s.

A surprising number of people seem to think Eugenides is Cal: He's still asked on occasion to remove his pants to prove that he's not intersex (or a hermaphrodite, to use the word rooted in Greek mythology). Chalk that up to the strength of the writing, which members of the intersex community have praised for its sensitivity.

Yes, there are obvious parallels between narrator and author: Both were born in 1960 Detroit as a grandchild of Greek immigrants; both have older brothers who went through hippie phases and dropped out of society for a time; both have wound up with Japanese-American women (Eugenides's wife is the artist Karen Yamauchi); and both have, as Middlesex has it, "the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both." But Cal is only as much like Jeffrey Eugenides as he is like anyone.

"What my character goes through is something everyone goes through: a vast and unsettling transformation in adolescence," Eugenides says. "His body changes more than our bodies have changed, he has to find out where his sexual desire leads him, and that's also something people go through, so my idea was that when people read the book they would recognize a lot about their own adolescence."

Eugenides began writing Middlesex around 1993 - that is, he's been living with the book in one form or another for more than half of his adult life - and when he first shows up at this coffee shop he agrees that he's pretty much talked out about it. But over the course of almost two hours, Eugenides suggests that he only now, almost 15 years later, may be uncovering the seed within him that led to the book's creation.

Two nights ago, he had a startling dream: his grandfather was alive. In fact, the old man had had a stroke when Jeffrey was just a child, precluding the two from ever really communicating. "I realized that something very deep in my unconscious has to do with my grandfather's stroke, his inability to speak, and my love and my interest in his life which was unresolved, which may have led me to finally take up this material," he says.

Eugenides had used the immigrant outline of his family's history for Middlesex only because it lent itself to an exploration of his themes: intersexuality, the myth of Hermaphroditus, classical Greek culture. Or so he'd thought. "Intellectually, I was just choosing it because it was appropriate and it would help my story; I didn't know the depths of emotion that were probably fuelling me to choose the material. It seemed as though it was just a choice made in clarity and a certain amount of volition on my own part. But perhaps not."

Over the years, some readers close to the family have muttered about Eugenides airing dirty laundry in public: a charge which is untrue, he says, since the book takes only vague details from the family's history. (No, his grandparents were not siblings; yes, his grandfather was a learned man from the old country who ended up tending bar in the new.) "Maybe the book being selected by Oprah made me worry what people would think, in some way that made me have this dream. It's hard to know, but it was a very intensely emotional dream and it just made me aware that there was something that I hadn't really put my finger on at the source of the whole book. Something having to do with not knowing my grandparents, having them die when I was fairly young, especially my grandfather who started having strokes when I was eight or nine."

It also turns out that Eugenides, who has an Old World mien in photographs that comes from his angular features, high forehead and mustache, closely resembles his grandfather.

"When the older relatives see me, they almost think it's seeing a ghost of him," he says. "So that idea in this dream for a moment that he was actually still alive and I was going to be able to ask him all these questions ... " he trails off, looking for the conclusion to his thought. "I didn't realize I wanted to know the answers to those questions so much - even while I was writing the book - until I had this dream the other night. Obviously I was fictionally and imaginatively trying to answer the questions by writing the book. But I was never aware of a pressing need.

"On the other hand, maybe it's just that my wife happened to wake me up in the middle of my dream so I remembered it." He laughs. "It could have just gone by in the silence of the night and I never would have remembered it."

*****

The Oprah effect

The Oprah Winfrey Show, now 20 years old, has been No. 1 on daytime television for 19 seasons. And that means she has a lot of clout.

Luxury-goods maker Hermès SA got a glimpse of that clout when Winfrey was denied entry to an Hermès boutique as it was closing. The company suffered such negative publicity - media reports implied racism was at play - that the company's chief executive officer finally appeared on her show to apologize.

The queen of daytime TV made national news when she devoted two episodes to the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Touring a devastated New Orleans, Winfrey called for a national apology for the inadequate relief effort and vowed, "I'll get the country to pray."

During an appearance on her show, U.S. Senator Barak Obama told Winfrey that if he ever decided to run for president, he would announce it on her show. (He didn't. He made the announcement on Feb. 10 in Springfield, Ill.).

After giving away 276 Pontiac G6 sedans on her show, Pontiac's annual sales of the model jumped to nearly 100,000 units, making it a runaway bestseller.

On notoriously difficult Broadway, Oprah is producer of The Color Purple, which has enjoyed 90-per-cent-capacity houses and regularly takes in more than $1-million (U.S.) a week, despite weak reviews.

Winfrey played a key role in turning the dark comedy Desperate Housewives into a juggernaut by devoting two full episodes of her own show to the ladies of Wisteria Lane.

According to the Save Darfur Coalition, donations shot up 1,200 per cent after Oprah featured their work.

2007 Dow Jones & Co. Inc. and staff