Middlesex: A Novel
by Jeffrey Eugenides
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Book Reviews of Middlesex: A Novel
Book Review: Yin and yang, sun and moon, Mars and Venus, together.
Summary: 4 Stars
Jeffrey Eugenides accomplishes many feats in "Middlesex", the most significant being that he manages to be completely convincing writing in the first person as a hermaphrodite. But Middlesex is not at all a freak show. Eugenides skillfully uses the narrator's hermaphrodite condition to craft a unique story of the assimilation of 20th century immigrants to America. Eugenides' ultimate aim is to show the degree to which society impacts the individual, and he succeeds admirably. You don't at all have to be a hermaphrodite or a Greco-American to identify with the lessons in Middlesex.
The author Cal/Calliope's condition is caused by a single mutant gene, but because of society's gender norms and the influence of family members, friends, strangers, educators, and the medical profession, the impact of that one mutant gene is immense (literally, life and death), far exceeding the actual physical impact on Cal/Calliope's body. Middlesex is a plea for tolerance and acceptance, and Eugenides proves his case by illustrating what happens when those ideals are violated. Even for those characters that are not hermaphrodites (such as Cal's brother, who gets caught up in the sixties anti-war counterculture), society also plays a heavy role in determining one's actions and fates. Any self-aware reader who possesses at least one "outside the norm" condition (and who among us does not?) will identify on that abstract level with Cal.
Eugenides, writing as Cal/Calliope, manages to give proper voice to both his male and female sides. The supporting characters in Middlesex are a very interesting, memorable collection of personalities. The book is a fairly quick read, and the ending is especially fast paced and gripping. So, what is the flaw that prevents me from giving Middlesex a five star rating? Simply this: the first half of the book, up to the moment of Cal's birth, is not nearly as absorbing or consequential as the second half, which focuses on Cal's life and gradual discovery of his/her gender and preferences, which precipitates the book's main themes. Eugenides intends the first half to be more than just the set-up for Cal's story, but I feel if he had restricted himself to simply that purpose, he would have created a shorter but even more powerful, moving story.
All in all, I do recommend Middlesex, but even though it won the Pulitzer, I don't think it is going to go down in literary history as a classic.
Book Review: An epic journey like none other I've read
Summary: 5 Stars
I barely have the words to describe this amazing and beautiful book. It is deserving of all the praise it has received.
The fact that the novel is set-up as the memoir of a hermaphrodite, Cal, is, of course, an attention grabber. I wanted to get right down into the nitty gritty. But the narrator started two generations back in his family, with his Greek villager grandparents, to explain the cultural, historical, and social circumstances which shaped the Stephanides family and led to his upbringing. I've always had a prejudice against historical fiction, but I gave the first few chapters of this a shot, and I was totally hooked on the lives of his grandparents, and then his parents, and their relationship within the world of Greek immigrants, Prohibition, and the white flight and race riots of Detroit. Cal was shaped genetically as a person, but there were also so many cultural and historical influences. This is an epic, and I loved every word of it.
The prose is unlike anything I've read before. Cal shifts from first person into an out of body third person with complete ease. Cal even acts like an omnipotent stage manager setting up a play about her life, and I just totally went with it. Usually, I shudder when the narrator addresses the reader directly on occasion, but I was Cal's confidante, and I loved every word. I never wanted this book to end.
A passage I had to mark for its beauty:
[p 217] Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. 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 show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." 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.
This is Eugenides' second novel, after The Virgin Suicides. I'm not cool because I didn't love the move made out of The Virgin Suicides, but this makes me want to go back and read the novel.
Book Review: Ah... Detroit
Summary: 4 Stars
This was a very interesting book. On a purely personal note, it was fun to read a book set in my hometown. The dose of Detroit history that goes along with the story of the Stephanides family makes this a fun read for anybody that knows how to pronounce "Gratiot" and remembers the reign of Coleman Young as Detroit mayor. Also, the connotations of the words Grosse Pointe are far reaching for those of us from the lesser Detroit "burbs." I'm not old enough to remember the race riots, but my old Italian relatives from Oakwood remember them well. It sparked some interesting dinner conversation with them over Christmas.The story of Calliope/Cal is illuminating on several levels. Puberty is distressing enough for girls, but to never develop the way you're "supposed" to develop is a central theme for Cal, who is intersexed. (I will use Cal's chosen pronoun and call him "he.") I admire the character because he is so self-possessed and pragmatic through the whole ordeal. It may seem, at first that the voice of the author is overshadowing Cal's voice; however, as Cal moves into adolescence, the tone becomes wholly unto the character. I think Jeffrey Eugenides handled Cal's struggle with great sensitivity. More books should handle this topic as he has. More books should be written about the intersexed, period. These people are not curiosities. They are human, and struggle with their identity in a way that is so magnified, many of us will never understand.
As a member of the scientific community, I thought the way that Eugenides detailed Cal's visit to the gender disorders clinic in New York presented many sickening possibilities. Many accounts of gender assignment of the intersexed infant have come to light recently, and it is clear that physicians do not always know the proper course of treatment for these individuals. There is such pressure to assign an identity for the parents' sake, that the child gets somewhat lost in the assessment. Dr. Luce's delight at Cal's condition, and the possibility to advance his own career is something to be wary of. This is a consistently emphasized point in Middlesex. Cal is objectified by this physician. He then objectifies himself, and eventually comes uneasily to terms with his body.
I enjoyed this book because it allowed me to examine many of the taboos that know no cultural barriers, such as incest and the idea of what is and is not normal.
Book Review: I'd really like to give it 3.5 stars or 3.75... but 4 is too much.
Summary: 3 Stars
The biggest downfall of this book is it's chatty, rambling tone through out many of it's pages. The prose was somehow... choppy? For me, there were times where the words just did not flow, and it was distracting. Another distraction was Cal's brother being named "Chapter Eleven"... I kept waiting for the explanation, which never came! Towards the end of the book, I decided I must have missed the explanation somewhere in the beginning, so I went back, skimming through pages... and... the explanation was not there, much to my annoyance.
However, I did enjoy the epic expanse of time and history this book covered, my own grandparents are Orthodox Christians from the Balkans that emigrated to Australia by boat after World War II. Lefty and Desdemona were authentic characters to me, Desdemona's dramatics especially rang true of every Greek, Serb and Italian grandma I've evr known. There was something comforting about them and I imagined my own grandparents in similar circumstances. I never really got used to the idea that they were brother and sister, however in parts of the book, I forgot about it and then I would be reminded and I would wince! I'm glad Eugenides included it in the story, because as with almost everything, it's very easy to judge and dismiss Cal's ancestors, or perhaps make inaccurate assumptions that this was a custom or common in Greek culture, if Eugenides hadn't taken the time to paint the picture and show us how it came to be that Lefty and Desdemona ended up marrying each other. There's a story behind everything, and when people do extraordinary things where we cannot fathom how they got to that place or why they would do such a thing, delving into the story can make us understand and I'm glad Eugenides included "the how and the why" the inbreeding that resulted in Cal/Calliope came to be.
I would have liked to have had more of Cal's story unfold earlier in the novel, the last 3rd of the book is the meat of the story and I felt it was held back for too long. I really enjoyed the insight it gave me into gender issues which is what drew me to the book and intrigued me in the first place.
Overall, I read it in about four days and I did enjoy it. I would recommend it if the subject matter interests you, whether that is gender issues, history, Greek-American culture. It is a great book. If any of the above is uninteresting for you, Middlesex will likely be a laborious read.
Book Review: Middlesex: a Classic
Summary: 5 Stars
Middlesex is an amazing book both for its tale and its artistry. The story's threads weave a rich tapestry of historical settings and life altering events in the history of a most unusual family. The protagonist, named Cal -- or is it Callie, is a hermaphrodite whose story spans three generations in his quest to understand his origins and recognize his true nature.
The writing is pure delight. The reader's canoe glides over golden nuggets of images, symbols, parallels, and beautifully crafted phrases throughout. The characters are real, honestly exposed for their blemishes and blunders; and the reader is drawn into their troubled souls to feel what they feel as their fates unfold.
The story is partly one of self-discovery, which is teased out of Cal's consciousness. In a school play, he is Tiresius, the blind Greek prophet who searches for truth while the gods change his gender.
For a glimpse of Eugenide' art, consider how he uses filaments in these different metaphors and images as the author ties Cal's Greek origins into other classical Greek tales:
1. He introduces a Chinese legend of a silkworm cocoon falling into the teacup of a princess who directs her servant to pinch the silk and pull the strand until it stretches far into the distance. The strand becomes a metaphor for the trail of a defective gene passing through Cal's Greek ancestral line.
2. Cal retraces his defective gene's path like Theseus retracing the path of a string he laid through the labyrinth in Crete. Both faced up to a "monster." For Theseus it is the Minotaur, an unnatural conception, half one thing and half another; for Cal it is himself, labeled a monster by a dictionary's crushing synonym for hermaphrodite.
3. In another passage, immigrants on a ship departing from the Greek port of Piraeus, hold balls of yarn that connects them fleetingly to family and friends left on shore. The yarn symboles the fading linkage to their past. The same image reappears in a hospital hall later as Callie and the object of her teenage affection release their lingering handclasp "as though it were a string of Piraeus yarn."
This book is enjoyable on so many levels that it makes the reader want to discuss it at length with friends in or out of book clubs. It is as rich as any classic.