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Middlesex: A Novel, by Jeffrey Eugenides
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A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
- Sales Rank: #610450 in Books
- Published on: 2002-09-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.25" h x 1.55" w x 6.25" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 544 pages
Amazon.com Review
"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." And so begins Middlesex, the mesmerizing saga of a near-mythic Greek American family and the "roller-coaster ride of a single gene through time." The odd but utterly believable story of Cal Stephanides, and how this 41-year-old hermaphrodite was raised as Calliope, is at the tender heart of this long-awaited second novel from Jeffrey Eugenides, whose elegant and haunting 1993 debut, The Virgin Suicides, remains one of the finest first novels of recent memory.
Eugenides weaves together a kaleidoscopic narrative spanning 80 years of a stained family history, from a fateful incestuous union in a small town in early 1920s Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit; from the early days of Ford Motors to the heated 1967 race riots; from the tony suburbs of Grosse Pointe and a confusing, aching adolescent love story to modern-day Berlin. Eugenides's command of the narrative is astonishing. He balances Cal/Callie's shifting voices convincingly, spinning this strange and often unsettling story with intelligence, insight, and generous amounts of humor:
Emotions, in my experience aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." … I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic traincar constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." ... I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever.
When you get to the end of this splendorous book, when you suddenly realize that after hundreds of pages you have only a few more left to turn over, you'll experience a quick pang of regret knowing that your time with Cal is coming to a close, and you may even resist finishing it--putting it aside for an hour or two, or maybe overnight--just so that this wondrous, magical novel might never end. --Brad Thomas Parsons
From Publishers Weekly
As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: "Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.' " The "me" of that sentence, "Cal" Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Eugenides spends the book's first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal's story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history, and Callie is left to think of her "crocus" as simply unusually long-until she reaches the age of 14. Eugenides, like Rick Moody, has an extraordinary sensitivity to the mores of our leafier suburbs, and Cal's gender confusion is blended with the story of her first love, Milton's growing political resentments and the general shedding of ethnic habits. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides's ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender. This is one determinedly literary novel that should also appeal to a large, general audience.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-From the opening paragraph, in which the narrator explains that he was "born twice," first as a baby girl in 1960, then as a teenage boy in 1974, readers are aware that Calliope Stephanides is a hermaphrodite. To explain his situation, Cal starts in 1922, when his grandparents came to America. In his role as the "prefetal narrator," he tells the love story of this couple, who are brother and sister; his parents are blood relatives as well. Then he tells his own story, which is that of a female child growing up in suburban Detroit with typical adolescent concerns. Callie, as he is known then, worries because she hasn't developed breasts or started menstruating; her facial hair is blamed on her ethnicity, and she and her mother go to get waxed together. She develops a passionate crush on her best girlfriend, "the Object," and consummates it in a manner both detached and steamy. Then an accident causes Callie to find out what she's been suspecting-she's not actually a girl. The story questions what it is that makes us who we are and concludes that one's inner essence stays the same, even in light of drastic outer changes. Mostly, the novel remains a universal narrative of a girl who's happy to grow up but hates having to leave her old self behind. Readers will love watching the narrator go from Callie to Cal, and witnessing all of the life experiences that get her there.
Jamie Watson, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
83 of 87 people found the following review helpful.
Absolutely engrossing and beautifully-written... until...
By D.G.
No need to repeat previous reviews on one fact: Eugenides is a remarkably gifted writer. I was hesitant to pick this up at first due to the bizarre subject matter, but my fears were put to rest instantly, for a couple reasons:
1) the novel cannot be so narrowly defined as simply being about a hermaphrodite; it's about the American dream; racism; finding oneself; the difficulties and confusing emotions of adolescence; politics; the inextricable link between history and each human being affecting and being affected by it... put simply, it's about life. And:
2) Eugenides' writing style is so descriptive and engaging that the reader is transported directly into the mind of the narrator, making the fact that Callie happens to be a hermaphrodite almost irrelevant--she/he is just a normal person with a slightly unusual body.
By the end of Book 3 I was convinced this was the best book I ever read. And then I read Book 4, the last 100 pages, and felt cheated, robbed somehow of the magic of the first 400 pages. The novel takes an exceedingly far-fetched and rambling turn; it is almost palpable that Eugenides was getting pressure from the publisher to wrap things up and rushed through the end of the book without really thinking through a satisfying conclusion. The writing style falls apart; the descriptiveness and magic is gone, and the story degenerates into a rather plain narrative of a freak's life. The real heart of the matter, how a seemingly normal person who happens to be a hermaphrodite copes with the discovery, never comes, and the 25 years of Callie's life between end of story and beginning of narration are never explained. Eugenides almost gives in to the freak factor by the end, leaving the reader with the lingering sensation upon finishing the book that Callie is merely a circus sideshow.
So, proportional to the number of pages that I thought this book was great, it gets 4 out of 5 stars from me. Almost but not quite!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Wowy Zowy, But Too Long!
By Abi Mensahib
From the beginning this is a very imaginative book, and it continues to the end, but it is so imaginative that it borders on fantasy. It is also seems to me that's there too much of a story here. Although the war between the Turks and Greeks and the lives of the original pair are interesting, they lengthen the book rather than enhance it. I was actually more interested in Desdemona and Lefty than Tessie and Milton who are pretty humdrum middle class. Their story is almost beside the point. We didn't need their history to find out they commit incest. I also was disgusted with most of Callie's introduction to sex: first with a male, then with a female, both her age then as Cal, the experience with the homosexual, and then his participation in the peep show. With that I nearly dumped the book in the garbage for a number of reasons: voyeurism, exploitation and then the ugly thought that Eugenides just put them in to sell more copies. Sex sells, as Joni Mitchell sings. There is a surprise just before the end then the book redeems itself with a "nice" ending, not necessarily a happy ending, but a good ending. Having said all that, I loved the subtle humor and loved his turn of phrase. There is a description of the dictionary at the New York Public Library that makes you want to go and see it then wonderful sentences like: "It was one of those humid days when the atmosphere gets confused...the air wishing it was water". You could fill several pages of exceptional descriptions like that. Eugenides is definitely a talented writer, but a little too clever, and he knows it. At some point you want to shout, "Come on, Jeffrey," but it's obvious that he did a great deal of research for which he's to be admired. It could be made shorter by doing the above, and, oh, the names Lefty and Chapter Eleven are annoying. How can you be interested in individuals with those names, but I'm nit-picking. There are sentences that make you think and provide a creative writer with the theme for a short-story, e.g., "Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself." I think upon reading it a second time, I'd give it a higher rating, but for one time only, it is too much to digest.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Worth the Read
By Lola G
I gave up on this book many times, but eventually I ended up getting into it and am glad I finished. This is a story that is generational. The first problem I had was the narrator was throwing characters around that were his parents and grandparents sometimes before the reader had a chance to understand the relationship. Adding to that they were also sometimes referred to by their names which made it even more confusing!
The narrator was mistakenly identified as a female at birth due to a chromosome issue. The story begins with the grandparents and their migration to America and the grandmother's fear that one of her children would be born with challenges. I won't reveal why so not to spoil for potential readers. The book continues with the journey of the parents and then ultimately with the birth of Calliope, who starts to realize that she is not like other girls her age. It is worth the read, just push through with the characters at the beginning. Eventually it will all make sense.
Middlesex takes place in Detroit from the time it was a flourishing city right up to its demise. I did find that aspect of the book great, and it all comes together in the end, however, the beginning was so confusing with the introduction of characters it left me frustrated so I had to put it aside for a while.
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