Middlesex (novel)

Middlesex

Author	Jeffrey Eugenides
Cover artist	William Webb (Bloomsbury paperback)
Language	English
Genre	Novel, family saga
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing (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 slow initial sales, the book became a bestseller. Its characters and events are loosely based on the author's life and his observations on his Greek heritage. Eugenides developed the idea of writing Middlesex after he read the memoir Herculine Barbin, and was unsatisfied with its lack of discussion about hermaphrodites' anatomy and emotions.

The narrator and protagonist, Cal Stephanides (initially called "Callie"), is an intersexed person of Greek descent. He has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency which causes him to appear female. The first half of the novel is about Cal's Greek family, depicting his grandparents' migration from a small village in Asia Minor to the United States in 1922, and their assimilation into American society. The latter half of the novel, set in the late 20th century, focuses on Cal's story in Detroit, Michigan.

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, a half-man and half-bull creature, and the Chimera, a monster composed of multiple animal parts.

Critical response to the novel was varied. Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review considered Middlesex one of the best books of 2002. Some scholars believed that Middlesex ought to be a candidate for the title of Great American Novel. Reviewers generally felt that the novel succeeds in portraying its Greek immigrant drama, and were also impressed with Eugenides' depiction of his hometown of Detroit, praising him for his social commentary. 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.

Background and publication

Two decades prior to writing Middlesex, Eugenides read Herculine Barbin, the diary of Herculine Barbin, a hermaphrodite convent schoolgirl 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". To learn about hermaphrodism, sexology, and the formation of gender identity, he sought expert advice. However, he intentionally 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."

Praising the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire for the "solitude, the quiet, [which] settles over you", which Eugenides felt fostered productivity, he traveled to the art colony in New Hampshire to start writing Middlesex. It took Eugenides nine years to write the novel, mainly because of the difficulty he had with its voice. Wanting it to be able to relate sagas in the third person and psychosexual events in the first person, Eugenides explained that the voice "had to render the experience of a teenage girl and an adult man, or an adult male-identified hermaphrodite". Middlesex was published in 2002, nine years after the publication of his first novel, The Virgin Suicides. The book was published on October 7, 2002, by Bloomsbury Publishing.

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 and nicknamed Callie. 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 would be male, while Callie's parents had already made preparations for the birth of a daughter. About half of Middlesex details incidents prior to Callie's birth.

The story starts again further back in time, in a small village in Asia Minor, with the protagonist's Greek paternal grandparents. Eleutherios "Lefty" Stephanides and Desdemona Stephanides are orphaned siblings who share a close bond that begins to develop into a romantic relationship, despite their misgivings. Soon, in the aftermath of the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey, and amid graphic scenes of the Great Fire of Smyrna, the siblings are forced to seek refuge by emigrating to America. On the eve of their departure, Desdemona agrees to marry her brother. The marriage is possible because no one in America knows they are siblings and, as such, the legal and social prohibitions against marriage between siblings are not a risk. They reach the United States, and settle in Detroit, Michigan, home of their cousin Sourmelina "Lina" Zizmo, hinted to be a closeted lesbian, their American sponsor, and her husband Jimmy. Lefty soon goes into an alcohol-smuggling 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 and the morality of her sexual relationship with Lefty. 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 and Callie. Chapter Eleven (a reference to the fact that he eventually becomes bankrupt) is a biologically "normal" boy, while Callie is intersexed. However, the family does not know this for many years, and Callie is consequently raised as a girl. After the 1967 Detroit riot, the family moves to a house on the street Middlesex in the Grosse Pointe neighborhood. The novel's title is a double entendre, in that it describes both the name of the road on which Callie lived in the 1970s, and his intersexual situation.

At 14 years old, Callie falls in love with her female best friend, who is referred to in the novel as the "Obscure Object" (a reference to the 1977 film That Obscure Object of Desire directed by Luis Buñuel). Callie has her first sexual experiences with both genders, the Obscure Object and the Obscure Object's brother. After Callie is injured by a tractor, 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 assumes the male identity 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 he is returned to Chapter Eleven's custody. Desdemona sees Cal as male for the first time, and she confesses to Cal that her husband Lefty was also her brother. After learning that Milton had been killed in a car accident, 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 starts a relationship.

Setting

The novel is initially set in 1922 during the war between Greece and Turkey in Bithynios, a small village on Mount Olympus. For hundreds of years in Bithynios, family members have incestuous marriages. On a regular basis, third cousins marry, causing people who are already cousins to become siblings. In 1913, many people moved away from Bithynios because of the Balkan Wars. Approximately one hundred people live in the village in 1922, with fewer than one half being female. Because Bithynios has shrunken even smaller than it has been before, there are few eligible girls that Lefty can marry. The village lacks a post office, a bank, and shops; it only has a church and a tavern.

In Detroit, the 1913 Ford Model T assembly line came into effect. Workers revolted by leaving the factories because they could not acclimate themselves to the new speed. By 1922, the new workers were able to match the pace of the assembly line. The work was divided into groups of unskilled workers, allowing the company to employ or dismiss anybody. In Grosse Pointe, because of white flight, a Point System existed; houses were only sold to the "right sort of people", not including Greeks or Italians. A significant portion of the novel takes place in Grosse Point. The incidents that occur to Cal's family parallel the important historical events of the 1960s. For instance, Milton's family business is destroyed by fire 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.

Autobiographical elements

Several people and events from Eugenides' life parallel those of the fictional Callie. Born in 1960, the same year that Callie was born, Jeffrey Eugenides is the son of a Kentuckian mother and a Greek father. He, like Callie, had to learn about Greek customs in order to understand his grandparents' way of life. Eugenides' grandfather resembles Calliope's grandfather in that both owned a bar. The bar in Middlesex is named Zebra Room, which was also the name of his grandfather's bar; Eugenides did this, he said, as a "secret code of paying homage to my grandparents and my parents". He noted that "[d]uring my whole life, it was crumbling and being destroyed little by little. And in a way my upbringing is just like a slow time-lapse film of everything falling apart on that street, because we would have to go down it almost every day." Both Eugenides and the narrator have lived on a street called Middlesex Boulevard. The two grew up in Detroit, were raised in the middle-class setting of Grosse Pointe, and experienced the 1967 Detroit riot. Both had grandparents that had been silk farmers.

Eugenides recalled how he, like Cal, grew slowly and felt much embarrassment. The all-girls' private school that Callie attends resembles University Liggett School, a private school that Eugenides attended before he pursued further education at Brown University. Both the author and his protagonist have an elder brother who undergoes what Eugenides called "hippie phrases" and disappears from society for a short while. Eugenides explained in an interview with the online magazine Salon that to write a novel that people could connect to, "I drew on my memories of my own adolescence and, as they call it, locker room trauma." Eugenides and Cal both move to Berlin. While Cal has a romantic relationship with Julie Kikuchi, a Japanese-American woman, Eugenides married Karen Yamauchi, a Japanese-American artist whom he had met at the MacDowell Colony in 1995.

Eugenides denied that the book was an autobiography. Explaining why his life paralleled Cal's, he remarked, "I think most writers use bits of their life to add credibility to their work, and that's certainly the case with Middlesex. I knew I was writing about something far from my own experience, so it seemed wise to blend that with a lot of things that I do know well, to make this story real for me, and hopefully for the reader as well."

While writing 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. When Cal discusses Callie, he adopts the third person to dissociate himself from her. Eugenides explained that "[t]he 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".

That Cal is an unreliable narrator is exemplified by the contradictory statements he makes. While narrating the story that pre-dates his birth, he remarks, "Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can't be entirely sure about any of this." However, he later says, "I alone, from the private box of my primordial egg, saw what was going on." The amalgamation of dubious omniscience and doubtful narration indicates Cal's "playful unreliability".

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 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 the "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.

According to Mark Lawson of The Guardian, the narrator's tone is "sardonic[ally] empath[etic]", and other critics have characterized the beginning of the novel as comic." The depiction of Stephanides' relationship with the African Americans, as well as America's race issues, have been criticized as having a "preachy and nervous" tone. Middlesex also has an ironic tone; while his grandparents assimilate into American culture through Greektown cathedrals and car factories, Cal's parents go on the typical journey of immigrants' children, leaving their small ethnic groups and moving from city to suburb. In one incident, the diner owned by the Stephanides is engulfed in flames as a result of the 1967 Detroit riot. Cal ironically notes that "[s]hameful as it is to say, the riots were the best thing that ever happened to us." The diner was insured, so the Stephanides have a windfall gain.

According to Stewart O'Nan of The Atlantic, the narrator, in the style of the picaresque novel, sometimes retells events that have already occurred. O'Nan noted that Cal also foreshadows the upcoming events in the book through "portentous glimpses". 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.

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" because the coming-of-age story is revealed to be the incorrect one. After being nurtured as a woman, Cal must instead learn to become a man. The book has "two distinct and occasionally warring halves". Whereas the first part is about hermaphrodites, the second is about Greeks. The latter aspect of the novel is considered by critics to be more effective because Middlesex is largely about how Cal inherited the momentous gene that "ends up defining her indefinable life". Also considered a family saga, the book covers 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. The novel's beginning is also classified as a historiographic metafictional chronicle in that it discusses events such as the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey and the Great Fire of Smyrna. As the story progresses, Middlesex shifts into a social novel about Detroit, discussing the seclusion of living in a 1970s suburb. At the end of the novel, the story adopts the tone of the detective genre.

Themes

Rebirth

Following the Great Fire of Smyrna, Lefty and Desdemona must start life anew. When she is 14 years old, Callie experiences a second birth to become Cal. To become a male, Callie peregrinates across the United States and becoming a midwife of her new life by teaching herself 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 predicament is a metaphor and synecdoche for Callipe's hermaphroditic condition; Callie's grandparents become Americanized through the amalgamation of the elements of heredity, cultural metamorphoses, and probability.

American Dream

Middlesex traces the trials and adversity of the Stephanides family as they pursue the American Dream. Beginning with Lefty and Desdemona, Cal's grandparents, fleeing from their homeland to Ellis Island and the United States, the novel later depicts the family living in a suburban vista at Grosse Pointe, Michigan. After they immigrate to the United States, Lefty and Desdemona find themselves in a blissful American that is on the brink of economic collapse. They dream about a perfect America where effort and morals will lead to good fortune. However, they must seek to attain this perfection during a period characterized by Prohibition and xenophobic anti-immigration legislation. Middlesex depicts the tribulations of attaining an identity, especially while dealing with the revelation that the American Dream is a delusion that has already disappeared.

Race relations

Middlesex portrays the race relations between people of different cultures. When Lefty, Cal's grandfather, a recent Greek immigrant, is working at one of Henry Ford's automobile factories, Ford investigators attempt to Americanize him. They visit his house to ascertain that he has been living as a typical American. For example, during his first English-language lesson, Lefty is taught that "[e]mployees should use plenty of soap and water in the home". The narrow-minded nativists believe that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe are unaware of the value of soap and water.

The relationship between the Greek Americans and the African Americans is fraught with prejudice. For example, during the Depression, Desdemona is shocked and humiliated that she will have to work in the Black Bottom, a predominantly black neighborhood. Despite being in the United States for only ten years and having experienced racial prejudice herself, she can, scholar Robert Zecker notes, "recite at heart the slights at blacks as lazy, dirty, sexually promiscuous, and incapable of self-help". While walking through the neighborhood, a group of African-American men loafing in front of a barbershop wolf-whistle to Desdemona and make lascivious comments, thus confirming the racial stereotype.

When African Americans are beaten or taken advantage of by whites, none of the characters in Middlesex feels compassion for them. The novel skims over the brutal attacks, lasting a week, on blacks in Detroit during World War II. Years later, in 1967, Lefty is incorrectly told that the Detroit riots were started by a black man raping a white woman; this falsehood is never rectified. However, despite this misinformation, Lefty denies service to a number of white customers who partook in the riots. One dismissed customer even yells at him, "[w]hy don't you go back to your own country?"

According to Zecker, the novel depicts African-American poverty but does not illustrate its causes. None of the characters think about how 500,000 African-Americans were placed in cramped living areas of only 25 square blocks and the bitterness and rage that stems from such conditions. The African Americans do not forget the years of oppression they have endured. However, the Greek Americans, like other whites, fail to remember that the African Americans were assaulted by whites in 1943 and faced over two decades of oppression after that. Instead, Zecker notes that the characters in the novel believe that the 1967 Detroit riots are "inexplicable cataclysms that came out of nowhere".

Opposites

Middlesex delves into the schism and reconciling of two opposites by contrasting the experiences and opinions of males and females; Greek Americans and WASPs; Greeks and Turks; and, African Americans and White Americans. Book reviewer Raoul Eshelman notes that 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 20th century and who had indirectly allowed his grandparents to consummate their incestuous relationship. Alkarim Jivani opined on BBC Television's current affairs broadcast Newsnight that "[o]nly a child of the Diaspora can do that, because we stand on the threshold of two rooms." The novel also demonstrates that love and family are vital to not only people with unambiguous genders, but also hermaphrodites.

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."

Callie 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".

Mark Lawson of The Guardian notes that the cause of Cal's hermaphroditic condition is an inherited recessive gene. According to UC Riverside psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky, the novel examines how an individual's traits are due neither solely to nature nor solely to nurture. Similarly, Cal's gender cannot be defined solely as male or female. Rather, it 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".

Gender identity

Raised as a girl, Cal views himself as a girl who likes other girls. His ability to have a "feminine gender schema" despite his having male genes, substantiates the constructionist position that gender identity is fully dependent on outer influences. However, when Callie discovers that he could have been raised as a boy, he renounces his female gender, recognizing his chosen sexual identity as a male. Disowning the female gender before he learned about masculine traits bolsters the argument for the "essentialist ideology of identity". Cal's embracement of the male identity inherent in him and renouncement of the female gender identity nurtured in his childhood is articulated by Cal when he reflects, "I never felt out of place being a girl, I still don't feel entirely at home among men."

Cal exhibits many masculine characteristics when he is a child. He writes, "I began to exude some kind of masculinity, in the way I topped up and caught my eraser, for instance." In another incident, Cal discusses how his penchants were masculine. While his female classmates are turned off by the blood in The Iliad, Cal is "thrilled to [read about] the stabbings and beheadings, the gouging out of eyes, the juicy eviscerations". Cal ponders his gender identity and how males and females associate with each other, reflecting, "Did I see through the male tricks because I was destined to scheme that way myself? Or do girls see through the tricks, too, and just pretend not to notice?"

Cal also exhibits feminine characteristics, which allows Dr. Luce to classify her as possessing a female gender identity. In a home video taken when Cal was a child, his mother gives him a doll and he nurses it with a milk bottle. Luce carefully observes Callie's actions and diagnoses them as feminine, which causes him to determine that Callie has a feminine gender identity. Luce then concludes that gender identity is nurtured and etched into children at their young ages.

Determining sex is paradoxical because the characters believe that the outward view of genitalia identifies one's sex; Cal's transformation into a male shatters this belief and the methodology behind determining gender. Eugenides addresses how difficult it was for humans to devise a "universal classification for sex". Through Cal, Eugenides opines that the 1876 system devised by Edwin Klebs that used gonad tissue to determine sex provides the most accurate answer.

According to book reviewer Morgan Holmes, Eugenides posits that a person's sexual attraction determines his or her gender. Cal's wish to become male because he desires females demonstrates a link between gender identity and sexuality. While Callie is not permitted to love the Obscure Object openly, Cal can freely love Julie. Holmes believes that the depiction of Callie "denies the legitimate place of lesbian desire and rewrites it as male heterosexuality". Book reviewer Georgia Warnke has a similar view. She writes that by making these choices in the novel, Eugenides agrees with the belief that being attracted to females is "masculine" and thus it is "more natural" for a male to be attracted to a female than a female be attracted to a female. Daniel Mendelsohn of the The New York Review of Books argues that Callie does not have to be a male in order to be drawn towards females; she could be gay. As an adult, Cal brags, "Breasts have the same effect on me as on anyone with my testosterone level." Mendelsohn notes that this assertion will astonish "Eugenides's (presumably testosterone-rich) gay male readership".

Greek mythical allusions

Calliope, the muse of heroic poetry, is the namesake of Eugenides' protagonist.

The novel frequently alludes to Greek myths. Eugenides said in an interview that "[h]ermaphrodism is an idea in human culture that has existed for thousands of thousands of years in classical Greek myths. A person changing genders is not something most people haven't wondered about or aren't a little bit fascinated about." Cal repeatedly compares himself to Tiresias, the male prophet who also switched genders. Both are omniscient narrators. Cal is compared to the Minotaur, a creature that, like her, was half and half—part man and part bull; she is in her own labyrinth and only her grandmother, who used to raise silkworms, possesses the thread that solves the enigma. The protagonist is named after Calliope, the muse of heroic poetry. The book discusses Sapphic love; Callie has sexual relations with the Obscure Object, her closest friend. Cal resembles 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 Callie 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 Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster. Eugenides' message is that "we must let our monsters out—they demand and deserve recognition—they are us: our same, self, others."

Incest

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 powerful taboo, indicating that someone will suffer for their wrongs; in a way, Cal's intersex condition symbolizes this Greek hubris. In another incestuous relationship, Milton makes love to Tessie using a clarinet which he lovingly rubs against her; their incestuous relationship enables them to contribute mutated genes to their child Cal. 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.

Reception

Sales

From the book's publication until the early months of 2003, its sales were unsatisfactory. However, in the week following April 7, 2003, the day Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize, the book sold 2,700 copies. The Pulitzer award nearly propelled Middlesex to The New York Times Best Seller list, which publishes only the top 15 bestsellers; in the week after Middlesex was announced the winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the novel placed 17th on the "expanded list." The book later made the best-selling fiction list and kept its position for five weeks. In June 2007, the novel ranked seventh on USA Today's Best-Selling Books list. In the same month, after Eugenides appeared on Oprah to discuss the novel, Middlesex placed second on The New York Times best-selling paperback fiction list. Since 2002, three million copies of Middlesex have been sold.

Critical reception

Some critics were dissatisfied with the scope of the novel. Daniel Mendelsohn of The New York Times Book Review 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 Callie/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 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 Callie's childhood was lacking; the book "gloss[es] over" how her mother did not recognize that Callie had male genitalia when she was washing or clothing Callie. Further, O'Nan characterized Cal's relationship with the Japanese-American photographer Julie as "underdeveloped", causing the reader not to experience its entirety.

Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly called the novel a "big-hearted, restless story" and rated it an A minus. 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". Andrew O'Hehir of Salon agreed, praising Middlesex for being an "epic and wondrous" novel filled with numerous characters and historical occurrences. Mendelsohn praised Middlesex for its "dense narrative, interwoven with sardonic, fashionably postmodern commentary". However, he criticized the novel for being a disjointed hybrid. He wrote that Eugenides mishandled the hermaphrodite material, characterized by Mendelsohn as "unpersuasiv[e]", but was successful with the story of Greek immigrants, described as "authenti[c]".

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."

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", and compared Cal to Huckleberry Finn, the narrator of Invisible Man, and J. Sutter in John Henry Days. Alexander Linklater of the Evening Standard commented that American publishers chose Middlesex as the next Great American Novel to generate progress for American fiction and that Eugenides is considered the "next stepping stone along from Jonathan Franzen". Dan Cryer of Newsday wrote that with the publication of Middlesex, "[f]inally, Detroit has its very own 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". Commenting that Middlesex is "more discursive and funnier" than The Virgin Suicides, Laura Miller of Salon wrote that the two novels deal with disunity. Mark Lawson of The Guardian praised Middlesex for having the same unique qualities as The Virgin Suicides, commenting that Middlesex had "an ability to describe the horrible in a comic voice, an unusual form of narration and an eye for bizarre detail". Lawson noted that whereas Middlesex deals with gender, life, and genes, The Virgin Suicides deals with gender and death.

Honors and adaptation

In 2003, Middlesex was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Pulitzer Board wrote in their report that Middlesex is a "vastly realized, multi-generational novel as highspirited as it is intelligent . . . Like the masks of Greek drama, Middlesex is equal parts comedy and tragedy, but its real triumphs is its emotional abundance, delivered with consummate authority and grace." The novel 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.

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 2007, Oprah Winfrey chose Middlesex to be discussed in her book club. Eugenides was a guest on Oprah's show with several intersex individuals who told stories about their lives.

The audiobook version of Middlesex was released by Macmillan Audio in September 2002. Read by Kristoffer Tabori, the audio book has 28 sides, each side having a unique style of introductory music that complements the atmosphere and plot of the saga.

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. Appearing on Newsnight, Alkarim Jivani opined that he believes Middlesex is superior to The Virgin Suicides because Eugenides is intimately connected to the Greek diaspora and is thus able to recognize the divisive elements.

Bibliography

• Aragon, Angela Pattatucci (2006). Challenging Lesbian Norms: Intersex, Transgender, Intersectional, and Queer Perspectives. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press. ISBN 1560236450.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• 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)
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• 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)
• Fischer, Heinz Dietrich (2007). Chronicle of the Pulitzer Prizes for Fiction: Discussions, Decisions, and Documents. Munich: K. G. Saur. ISBN 359830191X. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• 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: Associated University Presses. ISBN 1575911175.{{cite book}}: 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)
• Mirzoeff, Nicholas (1999). An Introduction to Visual Culture. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415158761.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
• Salinsky, John (2009). The Green Bookshop: Recommended Reading for Doctors and Others from the Medical Journal Education for Primary Care. Abingdon: Radcliffe Publishing. ISBN 1846193303. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Taberner, Stuart (2007). Contemporary German Fiction: Writing in the Berlin Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521860784.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: ref duplicates default (link)
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External links

• Middlesex at Oprah's Book Club