Middlesex- Jeffrey Eugenides

Now here's a modern classic.  For those that haven't read, this is essentially the story of a hermaphrodite telling the story of him/her-self from a gleam in the grandparental eye up until his/her late forties.  So that I can stop doing the him/her thing, I'll let you wonderful readers know that the name of the protagonist in Middlesex is Cal.  Or Calliope.  Or Calli.  Identity, I think, becomes quite complicated when you have a penis and a vagina. That, in basic terms, is what the book is about.  Who we are, and why we are, and how all parts of ourselves merge together over time to create an individual that has some semblance of a modern man or woman.

Now, there are a number of points this book touches on, so I'll take them one at a time.  First:

History- Eugenides, with his strong voice and straight-forward style, is a historian.  He takes the fictional (albeit seriously realistic) life of a confused young person in the 70's, fast-fowards to their forties in the 00's (this is my denomination for the beautiful age of no-time we just spent a decade in), and has that person tell the story of their grandparents and parents, starting in a small town in Turkish Empire (see Ottoman...)  Sounds complicated right?  Like, whoa man, can you hold all the threads together?  Nope.  Eugenides is concise and detailed; Cal as a narrator is unfaltering in both his (I'll explain the masculine later) omniscient reproduction of a life he admits to only sort of know, and in the engaging way in which he tells it.  The book really starts in war-torn Turkey/Greece.  It describes the horrible conquering and massacre of the war of Smyrna (something that actually happened and we as Americans, at least me, have literally no idea about), the lives of a silk-weaver and her brother that become lovers on a refugee ship to the U.S.A, and then their blossoming as a married couple in pre-depression emerging auto industry Detroit.  Zuitsuits, speakeasies, prohibition, the invention of the Cadillac, the riots in Detroit, the slow deterioration of a once great nation.  I'm telling you guys, Eugenides really knows his shit.  It is always, always a pleasure to enjoy the narrative of a story and then learn about real parts of this world without having to do two things at once.

There is some more to history, but this book is dense so that's it for now...on we go.

Authorial Style-  Let's just say that I checked numerous times to see if Eugenides was a hermaphrodite, to see if this was based on a true story; I parsed the pages to see what was real and what was fiction.  Cal gave life to a sexual and identity struggle through humor and history, and Eugenides gave life to Cal.  It is like reading the diary of some brilliant person (this blog...perhaps..eh, eh??), seeing the inner workings of a complicated mysterioso that seems to have some cool business going on.  Cal takes you in and makes you feel like you've known him for ages and finally, finally get to hear what he thinks.  My only comparison is that of Garp, in The World According to Garp by John Irving, in which after reading the book I realized how much I had thought was true, true to this political fact recording world, that he simply made up.  The style is not flashy or presumptous, it uses long sentences and short ones, correct commas and semicolons, but it brings with it the force of authority and some degree of labor.

Genetics- Now a big part of the hooplah about this book was its genetic bent.  Eugenides writes often like a scientist (another profession?) in describing the physical and genetic disposition that Cal has.  This makes little sense to me.  He explains it well, as you would read in a journal on modern science, and I tend to blow by this. I'm sure (the back cover tells me so) that many people enjoyed this aspect immensely (I think Eugenides covered his bases by being a historian, a scientist, and a novelist; we all had to love it).  I did not connect scientifically, but rather Biblically.  I felt his categorizing and serious use of genetic history to mirror the awfully long sections of our beloved Western dominant paradigm: the lists and lists of genealogy.  Blank begat blank begat blank.  Now, yes, dull it seems, but I feel Eugenides used an old idea and brought it to life.  He traced the life of his narrator back before his narrator was born, and in doing so, much like the Bible, gave us all little lessons from a multitude of times, helping us along our own way.

Identity- Now this is the nitty-gritty of the book.  The stuff that is past words and past plot.  This book won a pullizter and is read by Oprah, people have talked about it and an impact has been felt. Why?  Because we are all somebody.  We all look at ourselves at some point and wonder, who am I?  Who do the eyes in the mirror reflect, there is light there and we know it means life, but what are the details?  Eugenides supplies the details of an intensely complicated person, and makes you feel connected.  Identity is the core of this book in two ways: it is a definition of self through ones literal history, who our ancestors were and how their lives will forever shape our own.  It is also identity through the chance of fate, in this case, the blending of sexes to create a confused, beautiful, puberty-wrought girl that turns into a boy at the age of 14 and spends the rest of their life becoming comfortable.  I think the power in this book lies in the fact that we all struggle with these things. Everyone hates puberty, everyone wonders at some point how they look in the eyes of their peers and sexual equals; it hits the issues head on but from a seemingly more complicated and confused perspective than our own, and in doing so gives us hope.  Because, well, Cal found hope. We can all breathe again knowing that someone so predispositioned to confusion can come out ok. Eugenides teaches us that all skin crawls, all locker-room situations are less than satisfactory, and that, most important, we decide who we want to be.


Getting pretty deep here.  Book review, for real yall.  Also, this is starting to look like an academic paper.  Sorry about that, I haven't written a paper in so long I must be craving it or something.  This was an incredible book.  Read it, please.

p.s. after the age of 14 Cal decides to be a man, and therefore is a "he" for a large portion of the book and that is why I use "him" to describe him in most of this post.

p.p.s I love reading!!