Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jeffrey EugenidesEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-06-05
ISBN: 0312427735
Number of pages: 544
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
Book Review: It was the best of books; it was the worst of books
Summary: 3 Stars
This is really two books, one a family history, the other a personal narrative. The first one is insufferably bad; two stars out of five at best. The second one is good, perhaps four and a half stars. I suspect that a considerable amount of time separated the writing of the two portions, and that the second half was written first.
THE BAD:
The plot of the first part (and really of the second, although that is more forgivable, given the subject matter) consists solely of a Forrest Gump-ian series of highly improbable occurrences which, like the Gump movie, tie the main characters into every significant event of the era.
To make sure you realize the rich ethnicity of his story, Eugenides gives his characters preposterous, annoying names: Desdemona, Eleutherios (in fairness, this one goes by Lefty), and my personal un-favorite, Sourmelina. In the event that some wise-guy decides to post a comment that these are in fact run-of-the-mill Greek names, know that there is also an American black character named Marius Wyxzewixard Challouehliczilczese Grimes. Jesus! (And of course, why explain to the reader why the brother is named Chapter Eleven? The name is so witty and charming just the way it is.)
More painful is the writing style itself. I have never encountered such a self-conscious, self-centered, overwritten style in actual print. If the author were writing this for a junior college creative writing class, the pages would be returned with 80% of the content crossed out.
Never in the history of third person narration has there ever been such rampant use of first person pronouns: I, me, my, mine, I, me, me, me. Since Eugenides is telling his family history, some of this is necessary. But Eugenides' desire to place himself at the center of all things pushes this WAY over the top. Just shut up and tell the story! His incessant first person pontificating drags things out five times longer than need be and is just plain annoying.
From p. 206, describing secret activity that occurred before the narrator was born: "Only I, from the private box of my primordial egg, saw what was going on." SHUT UP!!! If you can read this kind of comment over and over for almost 300 pages without wanting to kill the author several times along the way, you are a better person than I.
The worst part of all of this is that, amidst all this prose, you never really feel that you know the characters. Their actions are inconsistently motivated; their dialog stilted in order to accommodate Eugenides' endless side commentary. They have been elaborately built up but never actually revealed.
Lastly, in his quest to establish himself as the apex of the universe, Eugenides makes an offensive claim about the Nation of Islam which, if made about a larger or more powerful faith, would rightly be met with widespread condemnation. Shame on you, Eugenides.
THE GOOD:
Really, we read this book to learn about the life of a hermaphrodite, and on that front Eugenides acquits himself quite well. The writing in the second half of the book ranged from mildly annoying to profound and moving. His rampant egocentricism is fitting here, since the narration is now appropriately in the first person, and, at last, he is finally talking about himself.
Many of the comments on Amazon, as well as from people I know who have read the book, express that the end portion of the book goes a bit long. I completely disagree. First of all, I would think that people who could people slug their way through the first 270 or so pages of this book would be able to tolerate anything. Secondly, the plot follows a natural progression of what might happen to someone in the position of the book's protagonist.
Indeed, if you have reservations about reading this book, you'd do better to fear the first half than the ending. Sure, the last mile of the marathon may be the hardest, but it was really the hills in the first part that got you. It's a toss-up whether to recommend this book; your reading sensibilities have to take a horrific sustained beating before you get to the good part. I guess if I could make it to the end, anyone could. But boy, did that first half suck.
Summary of Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club)
"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.
Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
"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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