You can just tell that Eugenides was reading Nabokov when he wrote The Virgin Suicides. That book steeps slow omnivorous language through pores of neologisms and words resurrected from antiquity; from Nabokov, Eugenides stole mood lighting and made it fierce and mysterious.

Now, in this curious collection, Eugenides curates love stories from giddy to grotesque, West to East, Alice Munro to Chekov. But the Nabokov is the ligature binding this body of work. The story is called "Spring in Fialto," and recalls in that fuzzy-yet-crystal clear Nabokovian manner the coincidental and fleeting meetings of Nina and Victor, two Russian expats. Now engaged to other people, now broken up with or married to other people, now unhappy with other people, the two invariable suspend the litigiousness of their lives and fall outside boundaries and into each other. And it's all so slippery:

"I call her Nina, but I could hardly have known her name yet, hardly could we have had time, she and I, for any preliminary; "Who's that?" she asked with interest-- and I was already kissing her neck, smooth and quite fiery hot from the long fox fur of her coat collar, which kept getting into my way until she clasped my shoulder, and with the candor so peculiar to her gently fitted her generous, dutiful lips to mine" (235).

You barely know that they are meeting for the first time before he's kissing her. I had to re-read the passage and try to figure out where they were: alone? outside? still in the parlor with all the rest of the people? And then there's the peculiarity of her response: candor, and generous, dutiful lips. Lips that are used to being kissed, and know what it is to do in such a situation. Generous because they are free to pull away?

Conclusion: read this.