middlesex jeffrey eugenides

Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)

"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless

Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in

an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."

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The narrator of this oh-so-cutely titled, Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel

inhabits the middle ground between male and female. Raised by

unknowing parents as a girl, Calliope Stephanides, now

forty-one-year-old Cal Stephanides, narrates her girlhood and the

history of the two generations before her, whose inbreeding resulted

in her condition. "Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my

fifth chromosome!" Cal writes in the opening chapter. "Sing how it

passed down through nine generations, gathering invisibly within the

polluted pool of the Stephanides family." Evoking epic tradition,

Eugenides tells a sweeping tale of a Greek family who come to rest in

Michigan, but while anchored in a very old tradition he has an

original and arresting take on gender.

In this epic, an individual comes to terms with a destiny written by

forces greater than herself. But those forces are no longer

supernatural or divine, or even societal; they're genetic.

While the romance and intrigue of Callie's ancestors are absorbing and

intrinsic to the impact of the story, the real fireworks start when

Calliope enters the fictional world. She shatters the boundaries that

we unconsciously expect in characters; she can't be categorized or

contextualized, despite the copious amount of backstory. No wonder her

favorite place at school is a basement bathroom -- not only, as the

narrator says, because on its graffitied walls "people wrote down what

they couldn't say" but because it's a marginal space. Outside of

boundaries, outside time.

At first I thought Eugenides' writing might be too precious (in the

"Sing, O Muse" sentences quoted above, for example). But after the

grandiosity of the opening chapter the prose style becomes less

intrusive, though never lacking in a somewhat mannered musicality. In

short it's along the lines of what you'd expect from an Oprah

selection, but slightly more cerebral (and palatable). I wouldn't read

this book for sheer joy in how it's written; more, to devour the food

for thought contained in every action of Calliope's, every machination

that brings about her birth and her discovery of herself.

Not only this, but Callie is a believable adolescent, tortured by all

the usual angst of a coming-of-age novel, and burdened with more than

sufficient material for an existential crisis. The understanding of

humanity contained within this novel is deep -- the breadth of

sexuality and love and fear that individuals experience. From the

1920s' New Woman and unabashed lesbian Sourmelina to the 1990s' Zora,

an academically-minded exotic dancer with Androgen Insensitivity and

deep distrust of men, characters -- particularly women -- seem to form

almost a catalog of the varieties of sex and gender in the twentieth

century. The machinery of the narrative isn't always invisible, and

sometimes it's even a bit creaky, but Cal often draws back to look at

that very machinery and give us meta-commentary on his storytelling.

Everything fits together. Everything has brought Cal to where he is

now. Middlesex weaves a story at once organic and self-conscious,

circular and linear, masculine and feminine.

In Summary: Highly recommended; a fascinating, complex exploration of