Title: Middlesex Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Published: January 1, 2002
Genre(s): Literary Fiction
Page Count: 529
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one to he most audacious and wonderous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesexis an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
I meditated on reading this book for several years before I actually got around to reading it. In spite of the general acclaim that Middlesex has garnered, there were several factors that seemingly did not lend itself to the belief that this would be a book for me: postmodern lit is something I’m generally wary of; I’m likewise wary of any prize-winning novels, so Eugenides’ Pulitzer was suspicious; also, not to be rude, fiction written by a white person of the male persuasion is…not really my favorite thing (there are exceptions). So, in short, Middlesex seemed like one of those much-hyped popular novels that I probably needed to stay far away from. So I did stay away—until now.
And my, isn’t this such a negative opener to what is going to eventually be a fairly positive review?
In case…
For the uninitiated, Middlesex concerns itself with the coming of age of an intersex (or hermaphroditic) man of the Baby Boomer generation, and also with that man’s general family saga. It’s a two-for-one kind of plot—you get the coming of age tale and the multi-generational American Dream immigrant tale. For the most part, Jeffrey Eugenides pulls off this dual-focus well, though not flawlessly. There were definite hiccups.
I myself found that the entire first half of the book is entirely wrapped up with the lives of Cal’s (the protagonist’s) grandparents and parents. All that is well and good, but only if Middlesex truly was a book about a family in 20th century America, rather than the story of an adolescent’s struggles with gender identity, which I believe is truly what the “point” of the book is. So the author spends hundreds of pages on what is, objectively speaking, backstory to the actual plot. And while it’s not that the dramas of the Stephanides family are uninteresting, it’s that they seemed impertinent to the story itself. I would have been quite satisfied with just knowing that in 1922, two Greek siblings decided they were in love, got married, then came to America, and that some 25 years later, their son married a cousin, and that son then gave them an intersex grandchild. This could have been established in 50 or 75 pages easily, thus eliminating the massive slog through the beginning sections of the novel, when I was constantly wondering when Eugenides was going to begin with the “real story”. At one point, while Cal is relating all of this family history, he comments that in the end his parents and grandparents don’t really matter—I agree. In my opinion, Middlesex has a painfully slow-going start, and I was neither engaged nor intrigued by the seemingly endless mundanity of the incestuous Stephanides family.
Yet when we actually get around to Cal’s portion of the story, I warmed up to the book quite a bit. Though he never feels out of place as a girl, his childhood is characterized by differences and places where he doesn’t match up with his peers the way he feels he should. On the whole, I felt that Jeffrey Eugenides did a very nice job of handling the entire topic of being intersex. The second half of Middlesex is engrossing and fascinating, and I think displays the capabilities of a gifted storyteller.
Though at the same time, Eugenides’ ideas concerning gender seemed to be fairly old-fashioned and stereotypical. Cal explains that he likes breasts “as much as any other man with average testosterone levels”—but what about homosexuals who have testosterone but aren’t attracted to the female body? Or there were cases when Cal divides certain behaviors into “male” and “female” roles. For instance, Cal acts like a woman because he calls his mother every Sunday and gossips about the family with her; but Cal acts like a man because he enjoys the The Iliad, apparently a book women just don’t enjoy because it’s about war (as a woman who enjoyed The Iliad very much, I take exception). It seemed to me that Middlesex took one step in the right direction concerning Cal’s intersex identity, but two huge steps backwards in perpetuating traditional gender roles. I was often really put off by the author’s claim that women like certain things or have X behaviors, and men have the opposite. In my mind, a woman who likes to play football or rugby or a man who goes to a hair salon with his mother aren’t such anomalies that their behavior can only be explained by being born with hermaphroditism.
However, Eugenides is a good writer. His prose wasn’t really “special” for me, but it was well-constructed and often insightful. I’m sure academics and suchlike can find deeper meaning in Middlesex that I, as a casual reader did not. That’s fine. I wasn’t wildly impressed by the author’s writing, but it was effective and had a strong narrative voice throughout. The was also copious breaking of the fourth wall, which is a literary technique I will never really support, though I find nothing inherently wrong with it at the same time.
Further commentary is, at this point, probably superfluous. With books of this sort of reputation there’s not much to say that hasn’t already been said by much better writers with more discerning minds. My opinions regarding Middlesex basically amount to appreciation for a story well-told but nothing much beyond that. I’m glad I read it; it wasn’t difficult to read; neither was exciting. And that is that.
