Middlesex (novel)

Middlesex

Author	Jeffrey Eugenides
Cover artist	William Webb (Bloomsbury paperback)
Language	English
Genre	Novel, family saga
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK) Farrar, Straus and Giroux (USA)
Publication date	7 October 2002
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Paperback and Hardback) and audio-CD
Pages	529 pp (Bloomsbury paperback)
ISBN	[[Special:BookSources/ISBN+0-374-19969-8+%28Farrar%2C+Straus+and+Giroux+hardcover%29+%3Cbr%3E%0AISBN+0-7475-6162-1+%28Bloomsbury+paperback%29 |ISBN 0-374-19969-8 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover) ISBN 0-7475-6162-1 (Bloomsbury paperback)]]
OCLC	48951262
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 21
LC Class	PS3555.U4 M53 2002

Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 2002. Despite initially underwhelming sales, the book later became a bestseller. The novel's characters and events are loosely based on the author's life, including the 1967 Detroit riot, which he observed when he was a child.

The narrator and protagonist, Cal Stephanides (initially called "Calliope"), is an intersexed person of Greek descent. He has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency which causes him to have the appearance of a female. The first half of the novel is about Cal's Greek family, beginning with his grandparent's migration from a small village in Asia Minor in 1922 and then depicting their assimilation into the American society. The latter half of the novel is devoted to telling Cal's story in Detroit, Michigan in the late 20th century. This story is intertwined with meditations on the era's zeitgeist and bits of contemporary history, including the Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement.

Primarily a Bildungsroman and family saga, the novel portrays three generations of a Greek family and the journey of a mutated gene that effects momentous changes in the protagonist's life. Scholars have noted that the main themes of the novel are nature vs. nurture and rebirth and that the novel depicts the differing experiences of polar opposites, such as males and females. Middlesex contains many Greek mythical allusions, including the Minotaur, who was half-man and half-bull, and the Chimera, a monster composed of multiple animal parts.

Critics varied widely in their assessments of the novel. Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review considered Middlesex to be one of the best books in 2002. Some scholars believed that Middlesex is a candidate for the title of "Great American Novel". Generally, reviewers were of the opinion that Eugenides succeeded in his story of Greek immigrants. Reviewers were also impressed with Eugenides' depiction of his hometown of Detroit and praised him for his commentary about societal issues. In 2007, the book was featured in Oprah's Book Club. In July 2009, HBO announced that Middlesex would be adapted into a one-hour drama series, with the script written by Donald Margulies.

Biographical background and publication

Two decades prior to writing his novel, Eugenides had read the Memoirs of Herculine Barbin, which detailed the life of a hermaphrodite convent schoolgirl living in 19th-century France. Believing that the memoir evaded discussion about hermaphrodites' anatomy and emotions, he concluded that he would "write the story that I wasn't getting from the memoir". He sought the advice of many experts and read extensively to learn about hermaphrodism, sexology, and the formation of gender identity. However, he never met a hermaphrodite, saying that "[I] decided not to work in that reportorial mode. Instead of trying to create a separate person, I tried to pretend that I had this and that I had lived through this as much as I could."

It took Eugenides nine years to write Middlesex. He spent such a lengthy amount of time writing the novel because he had trouble with its voice which "had to be capable of telling epic events in the third person and psychosexual events in the first person. It had to render the experience of a teenage girl and an adult man, or an adult male-identified hermaphrodite." The book was published in 2002, nine years after the publication of his first novel, The Virgin Suicides.

The novel's title is a double entendre. It describes both the name of the road, Middlesex Boulevard, in which Callie lives in the 1970s, and her intersexual situation. About half of Middlesex details incidents prior to Callie's birth.

Plot summary

See also: List of characters in Middlesex

The novel begins with the narrator, aged 41, recounting how the recessive gene, 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, caused him to be born with the characteristics of a female. He is christened with a female name Calliope. After learning about the syndrome in his adolescence, he changes his name to the masculine name Cal. The narration periodically returns to the frame story of present-day Cal, who is bearded, male and interested in women, foreshadowing the personal revelations of Callie. The narration briefly explains how Desdemona, Cal's grandmother, predicted her grandchild to be male while Calliope's parents had already made preparations for the birth of a daughter.

The story starts again further back in time, in a small village in Asia Minor, with the protagonist's Greek paternal grandparents. In the aftermath of the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey, and amid graphic scenes of the Great Fire of Smyrna, the orphaned siblings Eleutherios "Lefty" Stephanides and sister Desdemona seek refuge by emigrating to America. With great ambivalence, but with few other options, Desdemona agrees to marry her brother, who has been increasingly regarding her not as a sister, but as a potential lover because no one knows them so they don't need to worry about the legal and social prohibitions of marriage between siblings. They reach the United States, and settle in Detroit, Michigan, home of their cousin Sourmelina ("Lina"), their American sponsor, and her husband Jimmy Zizmo. Learning the ups and downs of the American culture, Desdemona and Lefty run into many hardships. Lefty soon goes into an illegal business run by Jimmy. In time, Desdemona gives birth to a son, Milton, while Lina gives birth to a daughter, Theodora, called "Tessie". Desdemona is made aware of the potential for disease in children due to consanguinity and becomes anxious about her pregnancy. With the quality of his marriage declining, Lefty decides to open a bar and gambling room, calling it the Zebra Room.

Lefty and Desdemona's son, Milton, marries Lina's daughter, Tessie. Milton and Tessie, who are second cousins, have two children. "Chapter Eleven" (a reference to the fact that he eventually becomes bankrupt) is a biologically "normal" boy but Callie is intersexed because of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. However, the family doesn't know this for many years, and Callie is raised as a girl.

At fourteen, Callie falls in love with her female best friend (referred to in the novel as "The Obscure Object") and has her first sexual experiences with both sexes, a brother and sister. After an accident, a doctor discovers that Callie is intersexed, and she is taken to a clinic in New York where she undergoes a series of tests and examinations. Faced with the prospect of sex reassignment surgery, Callie runs away and takes the male identity of Cal. Cal hitchhikes cross-country, finally arriving in San Francisco, where he becomes an attraction in a burlesque show.

The club where Cal works is raided by police, and Cal is returned to Chapter Eleven's custody. Desdemona sees Cal as male for the first time, and the book ends when Desdemona confesses to Cal that Lefty was her brother. Cal stands in the doorway to the family's Middlesex home (a male-only Greek tradition thought to keep spirits of the dead out of the family home) while Milton's funeral takes place. As an adult, Cal becomes a diplomat and is stationed in Berlin. He meets Julie Kikuchi, a Japanese-American woman with whom he has a relationship.

Autobiographical elements

Several people and events from Eugenides' life parallel those of the fictional Calliope. Born in 1960, the same year that Calliope was born, Jeffrey Eugenides is the son of a Kentuckian mother and a Greek father. He, like Calliope, had to learn about Greek customs in order to understand his grandparents' way of life. Eugenides' grandfather resembles Calliope's grandfather in that each owned a bar. Eugenides named the bar in Middlesex Zebra Room as a "secret code of paying homage to my grandparents and my parents". Both Eugenides and the narrator have lived in a street called Middlesex Boulevard. Both Eugenides and the narrator grew up in Michigan and experienced the 1967 Detroit riot. The all-girls' private school that Calliope attends resembles University Liggett School, a private school that Eugenides attended before he pursued further education at Brown University.

Throughout the writing of the novel, Eugenides did not worry about how his family would react to the book. However, he admitted that when he was revising the book, he removed some information that would be potentially offensive to his relatives. Eugenides remarked, "I keep filial respect out of my mind until I'm done. And then compunction rushes in. During the editing of Middlesex, I took a few things out that might have stung my relatives. There may still be things in there that will sting."

Style

[T]he writing itself is also about mixing things up, grafting flights of descriptive fancy with hunks of conversational dialogue, pausing briefly to sketch passing characters or explain a bit of a bygone world.

—Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly

Middlesex is written in the form of a memoir. The book, when it discusses Cal's family before he was born, is written with a "limited" omniscient point of view in an androgynous voice. Cal is knowledgeable of all that is occurring and that has occurred, but sometimes acknowledges that he is fabricating some of the details. The book shifts back and forth from third person to first person. Eugenides explained that "The voice had to be elastic enough to narrate the epic stuff, the third-person material, and it had to be a highly individualized first-person voice, too." Cal's voice is able to maintain the interest and empathy of readers because Cal is "[f]unny, humane, [and] endearingly self-aware".

As Cal transitions from being a female to being a male, the voice does not change significantly. The reason for this is that Eugenides does not believe that males and females have inherent disparities in their writing styles. That is, he believes that there are greater disparities between the ways that individuals write than between people of the opposite sex. Furthermore, the voice does not change significantly because throughout his entire life, Cal possessed a male brain and was a heterosexual male, and he wrote the saga when he was an adult. However, Cal was female at one point, so Eugenides sought to get "emotional stuff right". He consulted his wife and several other women who told him that the emotion was accurately portrayed. The women also helped him with the more feminine aspects of the novel such as toenail polish.

The tone of the narrator is considered to be "sardonic empathy". Critics have characterized the beginning of the novel about Lefty and Desdemona as having a comedic element. The Stephanides' relationship with the blacks, as well as America's race issues, have been criticized as being "preachy and nervous". Middlesex also has an ironic tone. Cal's parents go on the journey of immigrants' children, leaving their small ethnic groups and moving from city to suburb.

Eugenides frequently recounts the events that have already occurred and also foreshadows the upcoming events in the book.

Genres

Although we tend to take its genetic makeup for granted, the novel is a hybrid form, epic crossed with history, romance, comedy, tragedy. Sometimes the traits of other shadowy ancestors appear: confession, folk tale, sermon, travelogue.

—Adam Begley in The New York Observer

Middlesex is characterized as a Bildungsroman with a "big twist"; the coming-of-age story is revealed to be the incorrect one. The book is said to have "two distinct and occasionally warring halves". The first part is about hermaphrodites, while the second is about Greeks. The latter aspect of the novel is considered by critics to be more effectual because Middlesex is largely about how Cal inherited the momentous gene that "ends up defining her indefinable life". The book is also considered a family saga, covering the lives of three generations of the Stephanides family.

The start of the novel is considered a tragicomedy about the Stephanides family's migration from Greece and assimilation into America. As the story progresses, Middlesex shifts into a social novel about Detroit, discussing the seclusion of living in the 1970s suburb.

Themes

Rebirth is one of the themes in Middlesex. Following the Great Fire of Smyrna, Lefty and Desdemona must start life anew. When she is fourteen years old, Calliope experiences a second birth to become Cal. To become a male, Calliope peregrinates across the United States, becoming a midwife of her new life. She attempts to forget what she has learned as a female. Middlesex delves into the concept of identity, including how it is formed and how it is administered. The immigrant situation is a metaphor and synecdoche for Calliope's hermaphroditic condition; Calliope's grandparents become Americanized through the amalgamation of the elements of heredity, cultural metamorphoses, and probability.

Using modern pop music and Greek myths allusions, Eugenides depicts how family characteristics and idiosyncrasies are passed on from one generation to the next. He also employs leitmotifs to depict how chance affects the family's way of life.

The incidents that occur to Cal's family parallel the historical events of the day. For instance, Milton's family business is destroyed in a conflagration in the 1967 Detroit riot. When the Watergate scandal occurs, Milton empathizes with President Richard Nixon. At the same time, his son, Chapter Eleven, frets about the draft to fight in the Vietnam War. The novel also depicts Prohibition, the Great Depression, and the civil rights movement.

A central theme in the novel is the schism between two opposites. The book contrasts the differing experiences and opinions of males and females, Greek Americans and WASPs, Greeks and Turks, and African Americans and White Americans. Despite these conflicts, the narrator is able to achieve "ethnic reconciliation" when he moves to Berlin and lives with the Turks, people who had murdered his forebears in the early twentieth century and who had indirectly allowed his grandparents to consummate their incestuous relationship.

Nature vs. nurture

The novel examines the nature versus nurture debate in detail. At the beginning of the novel, Cal writes, "Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome." He then apologizes, saying, "Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic, too." This is an allusion to the poet Homer who was also captivated with the nature vs. nurture debate. In fact, Cal himself confesses, "If you were going to devise an experiment to measure the relative influences of nature versus nurture, you couldn't come up with anything better than my life."

Calliope has inherited the mutation for a gene that causes 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, which impedes the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone. While the former hormone causes the brain to become masculine, it is the latter that molds male genitals. When Callie reaches puberty, her testosterone levels increase significantly, resulting in the formation of a larger Adam's apple, the broadening of the muscles, the deepening of her voice, and the augmentation of her clitoris to resemble a penis. Doctors determine that Callie has the XY chromosomes of a male after inspecting Callie's genitalia. Callie's parents bring her to New York City to see Dr. Peter Luce, a foremost expert on hermaphroditism, who believes she should retain her female identity. Luce plans a gender reassignment surgery to make her a female. However, Callie knows that she has a sexual attraction to females and decides to run away to avoid mutilation and to pursue a male identity. When Cal has a sexual relationship with the Japanese-American photographer Julie at the end of the book, he is able to love "without the need to penetrate the object of his desire".

Science may cause people to be restricted by heredity, whilst the true cause of Cal's hermaphroditic condition is due to DNA. According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, the novel examines how an individual's traits are due neither solely to nature nor solely to nurture. Likewise, Cal's gender cannot be defined solely as male or female. Rather, Cal's gender is both male and female. Addressing how genetic determinism may have renewed the antediluvian beliefs about destiny, Eugenides refutes the post-Freudian beliefs that a person's traits are mainly due to nurture. Thus, the novel pits evolutionary biology against free will. Eugenides seeks to find a compromise between these two views. Explaining that gender is a "very American concept", he believes that "humans are freer than we realize. Less genetically encumbered".

According to book reviewer Morgan Holmes, Eugenides posits that a person's sexual attraction determines his or her gender. Cal's attraction to women demonstrates that he is a man. Whilst Calliope is not permitted to love the Obscure Object openly, Cal can freely love Julie. Holmes believes that the depiction of Calliope renounces "the legitimate place of lesbian desire and rewrites it as male heterosexuality".

Greek mythical allusions

The novel constantly alludes to Greek myths. Cal frequently compares himself to Tiresias, the male prophet who also switched genders. Cal is also compared to the Minotaur, a creature that was also half and half—part man and part bull. The protagonist is named after Calliope, the muse of heroic poetry. The book also discusses Sapphic love; Callie has sexual relations with the Obscure Object, her closest friend. Cal is also the hero Odysseus. Just as Poseidon and Athena beset Odysseus, so did the chromosomes hassle Cal. Christina McCarroll of the Christian Science Monitor wrote that "Eugenides wrangles with a destiny that mutates and recombines like restless chromosomes, in a novel of extraordinary flexibility, scope, and emotional depth."

Book reviewer Frances Bartkowski identified Calliope to be like a Chimera—a monster composed of multiple animal parts—in that in the end, she would transform into her own sibling of the other sex. When Callie is in New York, she goes to the New York Public Library and searches for the meaning of the word "hermaphrodite". She becomes shocked when the dictionary entry concludes with "See synonyms at MONSTER." Callie is not a Frankenstein; she is more like the Bigfoot or Loch Ness. Eugenides' message is that "we must let our monsters out—they demand and deserve recognition—they are us: our same, self, others."

Incest is another theme in Middlesex. Eugenides examines the passionate feelings that siblings living in seclusion experience for each other. Milton and Tessie, second cousins, are conceived during the same night, hinting to the incest of Desdemona and Lefty. Desdemona and Lefty's incestuous relationship is a transgression of a puissant taboo, indicating that someone will suffer for their wrongs. In a way, Cal's intersex condition symbolizes this Greek hubris. Cal's mother interferes with fate by attempting to make her second child a daughter. Cal believes this interference was a factor in him being a hermaphrodite. Conversely, Cal's relationship with his brother, Chapter Eleven, is indicative of the possible dissimilarities that are products of the biosocial.

Jeff Turrentine of the Orlando Sentinel was impressed with Eugenide's knowledge of mythography. Turrentine wrote that Eugenides was filled with "heroic energy, keen wit and genuine compassion" when addressing the Greek riddles.

Reception, awards, and nominations

Daniel Mendelsohn of The New York Times Book Review praised Middlesex for its "dense narrative, interwoven with sardonic, fashionably postmodern commentary". However, he criticized the novel for being a disjointed hybrid. He believed that Eugenides mishandles the hermaphrodite material, which is characterized as "unpersuasiv[e]" but is successful with the story of Greek immigrants, which is described as "authenti[c]".

Critics were dissatisfied with the scope of the novel. Mendelsohn wrote that thematically, there was no reason that a Greek should be a hermaphrodite or a hermaphrodite should be a Greek, but that Eugenides had two disconnected stories to tell. Caly Risen of Flak Magazine believed that the immigrant experience was the "heart of the novel", lamenting that it minimized the story of Calliope/Cal who is such a "fascinating character that the reader feels short-changed by his failure to take her/him further". Risen wished to read more about the events in between Cal's adolescence and adulthood, such as Cal's experience in college as a hermaphrodite as well as the relationships he had. However, Eugenides purposefully devised this asymmetry. Stewart O'Nan of The Atlantic also felt that the brief description of Calliope's childhood was lacking; the book "gloss[es] over" how her mother did not recognize that Calliope had male genitalia when she was washing or clothing Calliope. Furthermore, O'Nan characterized Cal's relationship with the Japanese-American photographer Julie as being "underdeveloped", causing the reader not to experience its entirety.

Andrew O'Hehir of Salon.com praised Middlesex for being an "epic and wondrous" novel filled with numerous characters and historical occurrences. Several critics have called the book a candidate for the title of "Great American Novel". Tim Morris, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington, wrote that the novel was "the latest in a long line of contenders for the status of Great American Novel".

David Gates of Newsweek contrasted Eugenides' debut novel, The Virgin Suicides with Middlesex, writing that the first novel was "ingenious", "entertaining", and "oddly moving", but that Middlesex is "ingenious", "entertaining", and "ultimately not-so-moving". Despite this criticism, Gates considered Middlesex to be the novel where Eugenides "finally plays his metafictional ace". Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly agreed, calling the novel a "big-hearted, restless story" and rating it an A-. Lisa Zeidner of the Washington Post opined that Middlesex "provides not only incest à la Ada and a Lolita-style road trip, but enough dense detail to keep fans of close reading manically busy." Tami Hoag of People concurred, writing that "this feast of a novel is thrilling in the scope of its imagination and surprising in its tenderness".

Marta Salij of the Detroit Free Press was impressed with the book's depiction of Detroit, writing "[a]t last Detroit has its great novel. What Dublin got from James Joyce—a sprawling, ambitious, loving, exasperated and playful chronicle of all its good and bad parts—Detroit has from native son Eugenides in these 500 pages." David Kipen of the San Francisco Chronicle agreed, opining "[a]mong so many other things, this praiseworthy, prize-worthy yarn succeeds as a heartbroken mash note to the Detroit of Eugenides' birth, a city whose neighborhoods he sometimes appears to love—as he loves his characters—less for their virtues than for their defects. Any book that can make a reader actively want to visit Detroit must have one honey of a tiger in its tank."

In 2003, Middlesex was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It also received the Ambassador Book Award, Spain's Santiago de Compostela Literary Prize, and the Great Lakes Book Award. Also in 2003, it was a finalist in the fictional category of the National Book Critics Circle Award.

In 2007, Oprah Winfrey chose Middlesex to be discussed in her book club.

Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review consider Middlesex to be one of the best books in 2002. In spite of this acclamation, its sales were initially underwhelming; it later became a best-selling book.

In July 2009, HBO announced that it would create a one-hour drama series based on Middlesex. The script will be written by Donald Margulies, and the project will be produced by Rita Wilson and Margulies.

Bibliography

• Bartkowski, Frances (2008). Kissing Cousins: A New Kinship Bestiary. New York: Columbia University Press. ISBN 0231144520.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Bonanos, Christopher (2005). Gods, Heroes, and Philosophers: A Celebration of All Things Greek. New York: Citadel Press. ISBN 0806526742.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Engel, David (2009). Fault Lines: Tort Law as Cultural Practice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804756147. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Eshelman, Raoul (2008). Performatism, or the End of Postmodernism. Aurora, CO: Davies Group. ISBN 1888570415.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Eugenides, Jeffrey (2002). Middlesex. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0374199698.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Gelman, Judy (2004). The Book Club Cookbook. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher Inc. ISBN 158542322X. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Holmes, Morgan (2008). Intersex: A Perilous Difference. Cranbury, NJ. ISBN 1575911175.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Lippa, Richard A. (2005). Gender, Nature, and Nurture (2nd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 0805853448.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)

External links

• Middlesex at Oprah's Book Club