Middlesex / Jeffrey Eugenides

Another day of Sunday reading. Again this week I participated on the Wordsy podcast. Check out last week’s episode, which also features yours truly. There’s more though. If you are interested in appearing on the podcast, Hans has set up a conference call and wants people to call in. The phone number is on that link, but I believe the time will be 10 a.m. Pacific next week rather than 9:30 a.m.

Reading today is the last 225 pages of Jeffrey Eugenides Middlesex. Last year when I worked at the bookstore, several of the more literary booksellers raved to me about Middlesex, so I used my employee discount and bought a copy. Given the size of my to be read pile, getting to it within the year is pretty good.

I can’t rave about it as much as my former co-worker though. I do see why it won the Pulitzer Prize, and why my friends loved it. But I didn’t engage as much as I would like. For one, it’s a family aga, and some of that form tend to drag. As did Middlesex. For another, a lot of the early family history in the book didn’t really seem to have a lot of connection to the main story. But by the time I got to the third and fourth sections, which are about the narrator, I was fully into it.

Calliope Stephanides is the narrator. He’s a hermaphrodite raised as a girl. This much is revealed early on, and everything builds to the point where Cal learns that he’s not actually a girl and comes to grips with it (mostly).

The family history told is that of his paternal grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, Greeks born and raised among the Greek minority in western Turkey. After the fall of the Ottoman Empire and a war between Turkey and Greece, Lefty and Desdemona escape to the United States (along with Dr. Philobosian, who plays a part later). The whole point of this backstory is that Desdemona feels guilty for her sins and believes that Cal’s hermaphroditism is a result of those sins. And in a way she may be right. But it ends up seeming like such a minor part (indeed Eugenides has Desdemona disappear in the last section of the book for the most part) that a lot of the history seemed kind of pointless.

In addition, there’s a bit part where Eugenides has Desdemona playing a role in the formation of the Nation of Islam in Detroit during the 1930s. Some authors feel the need to insert their historical characters into famous incidents. I don’t know why. It usually feels false to me. In this case it felt false and was also completely unnecessary.

The other part of family history involved is that of Milton and Tessie Stephanides, Cal’s parents. This is a bit more pertinent, for they fail to examine their daughter close enough to realize she’s a boy for 14 years. What personality traits and events can contrive to distract them so much? To me, this read like a lot of subtle commentary on the state of the American family during the 1950s and 1960s. Outwardly appearing to be very concerned with Calliope and her brother Chapter Eleven (I didn’t figure out why he had that nickname until the end), in reality they are looking much more at fitting in and achieving the American dream.

I also thought the last two sections on Calliope’s childhood and her realization that she’s not normal was quite well done. There’s a growing sense in her that something isn’t right. She doesn’t mature like other girls, for instance. It causes a vague sense of unease in her, but no direct questioning of what’s wrong. These days where sex is far less a taboo I suspect it would take a sheltering on the order of the F.L.D.S. for a person not to know their own genitalia.

I liked all the characters in the book. Eugenides portrayed every one of them except Jimmy Zismo (Desdemona’s connection to the Nation of Islam) in a positive light. They mess up quite frequently of course, but none came across as bad people. Just people dragged along by the cultural circumstances.

Anyway, it was good, though not as good as the other Pulitzer Prize winners I’ve read recently.

Title: Middlesex
Award: 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Cover creator: Henry Sene Yee (designer) / Olga Grlić (artist)
Imprint / publisher: Picador / Holtzbrinck
Format: Paperback
Length: 529 p.
Publication date: 2002
ISBN-10: 0-312-42215-6
Subject: Greek Americans — Fiction
Subject: Detroit (Mich.) — Fiction
Subject: City and town life — Fiction
Subject: Suburban life — Fiction
LC classification: PS3555.U4 M53 2002