• Read an
Excerpt
• Reading Group Guide

Cal Stephanides, the amiable narrator of MIDDLESEX, Jeffrey
Eugenides' big, beguiling treat of a second novel, is born with
externally deceptive genitalia. He's raised as a girl until a
heart-wrenching psychological identity shift at the
hormone-drenched age of 15. This is potentially trendy
talk-show-topic material, but rather than setting his sights on the
torment of gender confusion, Eugenides uses Cal's double-visioned
life experience as an opportunity to display a generous,
good-humored empathy toward all of his novel's characters, male and
female. By dint of his wide-angled perspective, Cal serves readers
not as a lens on the hermaphroditic, but as a prism of the
humane.

Eugenides grounds Cal's life story in the context of the sprawling
Stephanides family history, a Greek-American immigrant saga that
brings Cal's paternal grandparents to urban Detroit in the wake of
the burning of Smyrna by the Turks in 1922 and leads all the way to
the present day. Readers meet four generations of Cal's
consistently funny family; there are entrepreneurs, charlatans,
housewives, hippies, homosexuals, and religious leaders, all linked
by matrimony and genetics and love. There are births, courtships,
weddings, scandals, and secrets.

While MIDDLESEX is marked as very much a 2002-model novel by its
main character's peculiar duality and some highly self-conscious
storytelling techniques (a Citizen Kane style summary of the
whole book in its opening passage, commentaries made directly to
the reader, an audacious --- but successful --- blend of
first-person and omniscient narration), many of its charms are
decidedly old-fashioned. MIDDLESEX is a cleverly post-modernized
successor to the likes of Howard Fast's THE IMMIGRANTS series,
engrossing multi-generational bestsellers that were popular in the
Nixon era, when Cal Stephanides and Jeffrey Eugenides were growing
up.

Even the most eccentric subplots of MIDDLESEX (a Muslim temple
scam, a tension-fraught car chase, the invention of hot dogs that
flex like biceps) are imbued with a tender, familial warmth that
leads the reader to accept them with relative ease. Likewise, given
the slightest chance, Cal, nee Callie, will win the affection and
acceptance of readers who might instinctively shy away from a novel
centered on such a character.

Eugenides manages to tuck a strange personal tale into the
capaciousness of a traditional commercial epic, much as Cal's
pseudo-penis is hidden away in his labial folds.

Unlike Gore Vidal's brilliantly abrasive gender-bending in his
notorious MYRA BRECKINRIDGE and MYRON, or Chris Bohjalian's
issue-oriented melodrama in the recent TRANS-SISTER RADIO,
Eugenides opts for a sweetly comic --- and ultimately more
persuasive --- approach to confounding sexual identities. Bypassing
in-your-face gender politics, Eugenides focuses on undeniable
in-your-bloodline realities, the "roller-coaster ride of a single
gene through time."

"Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth
chromosome!" joshes Cal, in mock Homeric style, as he launches into
his epic family narrative, "…Sing how it passed through nine
generations…how it blew like a seed across the sea to
America…until it fell to earth in the fertile soil of my
mother's own midwestern womb." Eugenides slyly reminds us that,
however unique each of us may be, we are also entangled in genetic
history's grand warp and weft.

While genetic history provides MIDDLESEX its subtext, American
history is its backdrop. Eugenides aligns moments in the
Stephanides' lives with keystone episodes in national development.
When Grandfather Lefty arrives in Detroit he is briefly employed at
the Ford Motor Company, where, thanks to impeccable research and
virtuosic descriptive passages, Eugenides deftly etches the
dehumanizing aspect of assembly line work. He also riffs on its
long-term societal effects, wittily applying a bit of Darwinian
terminology to keep his big themes bubbling beneath the
surface:

"At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to
accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then,
however, the adaptation has passed down: we've all inherited it to
some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to
repetitive motions of 100 kinds."

The Detroit race riots of 1967, white flight to the suburbs, the
social divisiveness of the Nixon era, and the so-called sexual
revolution all feed into Eugenides' impressively casual plotting,
making MIDDLESEX believable despite occasional moments of
too-fantastic absurdity (Cal's older brother is inexplicably named
Chapter 11, a priest concocts a kidnapping scheme, Cal joins a
burlesque show). One is able to soar with Eugenides' wilder flights
of imagination, because he builds such a concrete world of perfect
period detail: young Callie's 1972 medicine cabinet is stocked with
"pink Daisy razors…a spray can of Psssssst instant
shampoo…a tube of Dr. Pepper Lipsmacker…my Crazy Curl
hair iron…and a shaker of Love's Baby Soft body
powder."

There are moments as well when Eugenides captures the pulse of an
era in his dialogue. Consider Chapter 11's explanation of his
refusal to use deodorant during his hippie phase:

"I'm a human…This is what humans smell like."

He also turns down a family vacation to their ancestral hometown in
Greece arguing that "Tourism is just another form of
colonialism."

The most awkward spot in MIDDLESEX comes at the most awkward period
of young Callie's life. At age 15 she begins to question her gender
and sexuality after developing a crush on a female friend whose
brother simultaneously lusts for Callie. As Jeffrey Eugenides
proved in his debut novel, THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, he has a keen sense
for the mysterious emotions of teenage attraction, the sometimes
inseparable blend of the sexual and the romantic. Once again, here,
he limns his characters' feelings with great precision. But because
the main character is Callie --- and because we have long
understood exactly what makes her feelings particularly exquisite
--- the book's pace flags a bit as we await her discovery of what
we already know.

After this brief lull, though, MIDDLESEX zooms through its
immensely satisfying final 130 pages. When Callie is brought to New
York to discuss her mixed gender with professional specialists,
Eugenides --- once again thanks to clearly thorough research ---
deftly navigates a broad, fascinating, but potentially confusing
field of medicine (For a more in-depth but also marvelously
readable study of intersexed children, see John Colapinto's
nonfiction AS NATURE MADE HIM: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl.)
Eugenides also uses his closing chapters to pull the characters of
Tessie and Milton, Cal's parents, out from the broad panorama of
family tapestry, providing readers with insightful close-up looks
at their confusion and their unquestioning love of their child. To
top it all off, right when you'd be perfectly happy to have
MIDDLESEX wax to a humorously philosophical close, Eugenides
delivers a slam-bang cinematic set-piece that shocks and soothes
all at once.

Old-fashioned and new-fangled, loaded with smarts but not afraid of
sentiment, MIDDLESEX is a joy to read.