middlesex jeffrey eugenides

Middlesex--Jeffrey Eugenides

I read Eugenides' first novel The Virgin Suicides about a year ago,

and was struck by how well written it was. The narration is in first

person plural--something you don't see a lot of in current

fiction--which had the effect of making me feel included in the story

in a way I wouldn't have felt with a more traditional narrative voice.

It has been pointed out that the narration acts like a Greek chorus as

seen in classical Greek drama.

The Virgin Suicides is almost dreamlike in its telling of the story of

five sisters in a strict Catholic family who are driven to kill

themselves over a relatively short period of time. The narrator is

actually the collective voice of all the young men, themselves on the

cusp of puberty, who are fascinated by the mystery of all girls, and

the glamorous tragedy of these in particular. The novel captures the

confusion of adolescence, when young men are attracted to young women,

while learning how little they understand them.

I was hoping for something as affecting in Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize

winning Middlesex, but I was disappointed. The story hangs on the

spine of Calliope Stephanides, a girl raised in Detroit of the 1970,

who is discovered to be a hermaphrodite at the age of 14. Many years

later, having decided to live as a male, Cal Stephanides narrates the

story of how he received the recessive genetic condition that made him

neither fully male nor fully female.

The story starts with Cal's grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty

Stephanides, a Greek brother and sister who lived in a small village

in Turkey while it was occupied by the Greeks. As they realize their

attraction to each other--compounded by the absence of other romantic

candidates--the Turks retake the country and they have to flee. On

board a ship to America, they enact a courtship as if they had only

just met, marrying at sea and beginning their new lives as man and

wife.

This was the most interesting of the stories--the one where Eugenides

most unleashed his ability to imagine other places and times and make

them real. The subsequent story of his parents generation--first

cousins on top of the illicit parentage of one of them--simply doesn't

seem to engage his interest, and if one can say he "skips lightly"

over anything in a book this long, one would have to say it about this

section.

Cal's troubled girlhood is really unremarkable, which is bizarre given

the lengthy set up to her birth. She has her share of childhood

experiences and friendship troubles, but her condition escapes notice

until she fails to hit puberty. At that point, after close observation

by a specialist, the recommendation is made to surgically conform her

body to her gender identification--female. Cal, however, has been

lying to the doctor about how she truly feels about topics of

sexuality and attraction, and so s/he declares himself to be a boy and

runs away.

At this point, I lost my patience with the story. Mind you, I had read

about seven thousand pages by now, all of which seemed to be

foreshadowing things that simply weren't happening. And after that

point, it got silly. Cal found his way to San Francisco where he

performed in a hermaphroditic strip club. The local priest tried to

extort money from Cal's parents, and Cal's father died in a high speed

chase across the Canadian border. Eventually, I just put the sucker

down.

What I loved about The Virgin Suicides was the amazing way he

demonstrated the different worlds the boys and girls lived in--the

oppressive horror of the girls' restricted lives, and the romantic way

the boys perceived those lives. I had hoped for Middlesex to take that

contrast one step closer, showing how the boy/girl experienced the

differences of living with those different gender identities. Instead,

when I got to mutual declarations of hermaphroditic free love in San

Francisco, I found myself in a different book than the one I had

wanted to read.

I started this post in March of 2006, and only finished it in October

of the same year. And in the intervening 7 months, I have had no