Middlesex-- Book #4

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003. I have been trying to formulate a review... and have experienced great writer's block. This book is... so many things.

Take the opening line, for example:

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.  

If it's not altogether clear from that cleverly written opening, along with the title of the book, I promise it's not a spoiler for me to tell you that the omniscient narrator and protagonist, Calliope Stephanides, is a hermaphrodite man. Cal, as he later becomes known, is of Greek descent, the grandson of a Greek couple who immigrated to the United States in the 1920s-- oh, and who also happened to be brother and sister. One of the children of this couple ended up marrying a cousin, and they had two kids. Chapter Eleven, a son, whose name is never explained-- one of my irritations with this book; and Calliope, at first a daughter, and the grand prize winner of a mutated gene that resulted in 5-alpha-reductase deficiency.

The first half of the book is about Cal's family-- starting way back when with Desdemona and Lefty, the incestuous immigrants. The latter half of the novel describes Cal's childhood, which he spent entirely as a girl; his adolescence, which was mostly spent in a state of confusion and disappointment at his failure to develop like his classmates; and his ultimate understanding and acceptance of his gender identity.

Eugenides based much of the story off of his own life-- though he is not a hermaphrodite. He is of Greek descent and lived in Detroit, and a lot of the other details of Cal's life were taken from his own.

The book is written in the form of a memoir, though Cal's narration is omniscient and thus describes things he couldn't possibly know. Major themes include rebirth, the American Dream, race relations, ethnic identity, Greek mythology, nature versus nurture, incest and intersex, and gender identity (naturally).

Now... to review it. Sometimes this is the hardest part. I honestly have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, there's no denying it's well written. There's some great humor in it. Additionally, I think Eugenides did a remarkable job of describing the reality of an intersex teenager and adult, and the challenges and confusion that can pervade such an existence. I obviously can't know whether his descriptions were true to reality, but they seemed authentic.

On the other hand, a lot of the story was just weird and uncomfortable. I didn't like reading about Desdemona and Lefty's incestuous marriage. There's a reason incest is illegal. And despite the fact that I know there are many people in the world like Cal, it's not what I'd call super fun to read about much of what they go through. I think I understand it better, and I have a greater appreciation for the serious struggle that it really is, but I'm not convinced that this book was the best way to go about getting that understanding. Eugenides was pretty tasteful in what he chose to include-- there weren't any graphic sex scenes-- but Cal is definitely confused and experiments in various ways before he finds some answers. Cal also ends up working at a strip club/peep show in San Francisco, and that's a section of the book I could have done without. The part where he finally sees a specialist in New York and gets some real answers about his condition was a breath of fresh air for me. I think I am more suited to reading the technical, clinical side of issues like this.

Basically, I think I finished the book more because it was like a car wreck-- and I couldn't look away-- than out of true enjoyment. Unlike The Thirteenth Tale, I don't plan on reading this again. Taking all of this into consideration, I'm giving this book 2 stars.

Title: Middlesex
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Published: 2002
529 pages