Middlesex: A Novel
by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jeffrey EugenidesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-09-16
ISBN: 0312422156
Number of pages: 529
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Middlesex: A Novel
Book Review: Middlesex Defies the American Great Melting Pot Myth
Summary: 5 Stars
"Middlesex" is misrepresented by its rather gaudy promotion as a glitzy Pulitzer Prize winning novel about sexual orientation and gender identity. You'll miss out on a delightful book if you believe this enjoyable read and spirited novel is just about the dark secret of how incest in a Greek immigrant (refugee, actually) family leads, ultimately, to the coupling of a pair of recessive genes on a sexual determination chromosome. This accident of genetic origins leads the main character, Calliope Helen Stephanadies, to be a hermaphrodite. It's a brilliantly written story, much more enlightening than a pseudo sci-fi biology thriller. I believe "Middlesex" is about America's history as an immigrant nation played out in Detroit, Michigan, and the myth created by our notion of the great melting pot. Rather than being a nation of assimilators, our country's diversity is ethnic, racial and (according to author
Eugenides)sexual. As for casual reading, this story isn't necessarily the engaging novel a bookworm of popular fiction might pick up. Promotional summaries on the book's jacket did absolutely nothing to inspire my interest. As or "Michneresque" European saga stories go, I've read a bunch already. Fortunately, "Middlesex" was selected for reading by our Medicine and Literature program. It's the first selection in our series of six months of selected readings in the 2005 Medicine and Literature program at Mid Coast Hospital in Brunswick (Maine), a reading seminar conducted for medical professionals and the community in concert with The Maine Humanities Council. As for medical interest, the novel is rich with the superstitions and science associated with forecasting the birth of a baby, in particular, a Greek baby. Old World superstitions supported by thousands of years of Greek history, culture, customs and obstetrics medicine intersect rather mundanely in 1960, in the nursery of a Detroit hospital. The Stephanadies family physician (himself a Greek refugee) skips a rather ordinary step in his ritual examination of a newly born baby girl whose family members are, also, friends. As a result, baby Calliope is raised as a girl when, actually, her sexual organs are hidden, the result of a "Gender Identity, 5-Apha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites" recessive trait. As with any entertaining novel, I learned a lot reading "Middlesex" and discussing the book's provocative themes. Medicine and culture notwithstanding, I learned to enjoy reading about the city of Detroit, also known as (a.k.a) the auto city of entrepreneur Henry Ford, with a rather dicey reputation as "murder capital of the world" and "Motown" to rock n'roll lovers. Detroit's amazing ethnic diversity is on display in "Middlesex". I found Detroit's little known immigrant history, lovingly described by Eugenides, as a "melting pot", to be a fascinating sub-plot in the novel. Detroit's compelling immigrant story is uniquely independent from the better known New York City variety, where "give me your tired, your poor" is universally recognized. Detroit, with it's myriad of French locale names inherited from the early colonial explorers and the city's neighbors to the North in Canada, is beset with worker-bees who flocked to the city for industrial automobile jobs. Henry Ford, founder of Ford Motor Company, wanted only the best for his Detroit. Riff-raff was hurled to the streets and out of his elite factories of mass automobile production. Obviously, Henry Ford didn't insure his brand of "gilded melting pot" would stick with Detroit very well. It's a city fallen into disrepair by reputation, and the modern historic and traumatic Detroit Riots of 1967. Eugenidies describes all the nostalgia of Detroit - especially capturing the hopes the city held for a better way of life for anxious immigrants like Eleutherios (Lefty) and Desdemona Stephanadies. They were brother and sister fleeing their burning island of Bithynios off the coast of Turkey in August 1922, when they took the desperate step of seeking refuge with their cousin Sourmelina, who lived in Detroit, USA. Because the two siblings were alone in the midst of emotional trauma circulating around them in Bythnios, they fell in love and were married by the captain of the French immigrant ship they managed, with great difficulty, to be manifest on. Of course, no one knew they were so closely related because there was nobody to tell. I especially enjoyed the riveting chapter about seven year old girl-Calliope darting her two wheel bicycle expertly behind National Guard Army tanks during the 1967, Detroit riots because she's on a personal mission to rescue her grandfather, Lefty, who is protecting his Greek restaurant, the Zebra Room, from being burned down by rioters. It's an adventurous piece of narrative worthy of a short-story, forgetting the sexual identity stuff.
Yet, "Middlesex" is a story about being "middle-sex", although the story's title derives from the name of the Greek family's Detroit home. Eventually Calliope becomes "Cal", but not without a dynamite interchange with the physician who breaks the news to her-his family. Eugenides creates real drama with Calliope's sexual discovery. Eugenides leaves readers in limbo by telling us how sexual identity, or hermaphadites or those who simply don't want their sex to label them, are the "way of the future". He leaves us with this sobering thought and nothing in the way of explanation. Is sexual identity a biological phenomenon or is it a social label? "Middlesex" is a provocative family story set during America's middle 20th century immigrant history covering World War II and the height of Detroit's industrial age. Eugenidies takes advantage of our sacred melting pot myth and proves we are all vulnerable to our culture, history and the random selection of genetic pre-determination.
Summary of Middlesex: A Novel
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver?s license...records my first name simply as Cal."
So begins 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 l967, 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 of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
So begins 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 l967, 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 of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
"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
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