The one(s) that got away -- novels that I should have read

I know this seems sort of crazy, since one can always get a book from the library or interlibrary loan on in extremis one can buy it on-line.  That is, if one remembers the particulars of the book, namely author and/or title.

I was just at BMV and I picked up a copy of Graham Greene's The Quiet American that I had been eyeing for a while, and there was a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex for $1.  Well, I've heard many good things about that novel, and even if I don't get to it for a while, that was a steal.

Back up all the way to 1992-3 when I was living in Newark and spending a fair bit of time at the Newark Public Library.  I honestly can't remember if they had local branches, but I always went to the main one right near the Newark Museum, since that had a pretty decent literature and poetry section.  During this period I read all the novels of Saul Bellow (except Ravelstein which hadn't come out), Barbara Pym and Graham Greene.  There may have been one other author involved, but if so, I am completely blanking on him or her.  It would have had to have been someone with 10-12 novels published as of 1992, and I can't think of any other novelist where I have read essentially their entire oeuvre.  (Though there will be a few more when I finally get to the end of the latest reading list.)

I did read other things, and in fact I read something like 100 books in 1992.  However, I remember thinking seriously about two books on those shelves and I kept passing them up.  I thought that one was Middlesex, but it was published in 2002, which is much, much too late.  With just a bit of prompting, I remembered that the other one was Katherine Dunn's Geek Love, which is one I should get to, but will put it off a bit longer.

That leads to another one of these literary puzzles.  I have a couple of posts where I discuss books that I read that I can no longer recall the title.  At least there you have some hope that you will recall a bit more and identify it.  (There are even people that specialize in this and charge a fee.  I used one to find The Great Alphabet Race, though honestly I have no idea why Google just didn't point me to the book in the first place, since I kept typing in alphabet race children's book.  Oh well...)  But if you never read the book at all beyond the book blurb in the back, well that is quite challenging.

I'm pretty sure this one one of those trendy books from the late 1980s or very early 1990s.  I am also convinced that the main character either was a hermaphrodite or changed sex during the course of the novel (again according to the blurb).  I know for a fact this isn't Woolf's Orlando, or Winterson's Sexing the Cherry, or even Carter's Nights at the Circus.  And it can't be Middlesex either.  (On the other hand, even the Library of Congress seems to suggest there are only 13 or so novels about intersex characters, and none of those looked familiar.  So this is becoming a real challenge.)

So far Goodreads is looking like the most promising resource to find literary fiction books that would have been trendy at that time.  As long as I am taking the trouble, I will go ahead and list a few other books that look like I might like them (in 2020 or so!):
Julian Barnes - Metroland
Neel Mukherjee - The Lives of Others
Jhumpa Lahiri - The Lowland  (probably will order this when the price drops low enough)
W.G. Sebald - The Rings of Saturn  (might actually have this in deep storage)
Richard Powers - The Gold Bug Variations
Jeanette Winterson - Written on the Body
Téa Obreh - The Tiger's Wife
Herta Müller - The Appointment
Cees Nooteboom - All Souls' Day
Cees Nooteboom - Rituals

These are not necessarily from the proper time period, but are books that do seem to be up my alley.

Well, despite a couple of hours of deep thinking about this, I haven't been able to trigger anything more.  It's kind of interesting how a fair bit of the 1980s and even the early 1990s is pre-web and thus not easily searchable, so it might as well not even have happened for the Millennials.  In any case, if this does sound vaguely familiar, please leave a note in the comments.  Thanks.