Middlesex: A Novel (Paperback)

by Jeffrey Eugenides (Author) "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..." (more)
Key Phrases: silkworm box, yia yia, carpet muncher, Father Mike, New York, Zebra Room (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
"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 --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly
As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: "Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.' " The "me" of that sentence, "Cal" Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Eugenides spends the book's first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal's story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history, and Callie is left to think of her "crocus" as simply unusually long-until she reaches the age of 14. Eugenides, like Rick Moody, has an extraordinary sensitivity to the mores of our leafier suburbs, and Cal's gender confusion is blended with the story of her first love, Milton's growing political resentments and the general shedding of ethnic habits. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides's ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender. This is one determinedly literary novel that should also appeal to a large, general audience.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 544 pages
• Publisher: Picador (September 16, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312422156
• ISBN-13: 978-0312422158
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (886 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #35,380 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

330 of 345 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A terrific novel!, March 25, 2003

By	Debbie Lee Wesselmann (the Lehigh Valley, PA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Middlesex: A Novel (Hardcover)

From the first sentence of Jeffrey Eugenides' MIDDLESEX, I was hooked by this complicated tale of a young girl who grows into a man. The story of Cal Stephanides begins generations before his birth, in a small Greek village, when his grandparents succumb to incestuous desires. Immigration to the United States keeps Desdemona and Lefty's secret intact - until their grandchild Cal reaches puberty. Told with both humor and earnestness, the story grows more engaging with every page.

The brilliance of this book emerges not from the superficial story of a hermaphrodite but from the context - historical, scientific, psychological, political, geographical - of Cal's birth and subsequent rebirth. MIDDLESEX is about much more than gender confusion. Cal's mixed gender can be taken as a metaphor for the experience of first- and second-generations born of immigrants.

While the context of this story provides the substance, the characters provide the vibrancy. Cal emerges as a reliable and likeable narrator. He is sensible, good-humored, and intelligent. The spectrum of his experiences provides a smooth transition between childhood and adult, enabling the reader to embrace the character as both male and female. Cal's family is affectionately portrayed, even with their failings. (Cal's brother, Chapter Eleven, annoyed me with his name, a running gag, but even he ended up a full-blooded character by the end.)

Eugenides has written an expansive, compelling book. Despite its length of over 500 pages, the novel is not a slow read - unless the reader wants it to be, to make it last. Accessible, intelligent, well-paced and plotted, it should appeal to a wide range of readers.

I can't recommend this novel highly enough.

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Woven Fate, November 26, 2002

By	"chilawyer" (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Middlesex: A Novel (Hardcover)

Though Middlesex's leading man(Cal)/lady(Callie) is a hermaphrodite, the book spends only a few of its pages exploring what it is like to view, or experience, the world from the perspective of both sexes at once. So if this is what you are looking for in the book, you will surely be disappointed. Rather, the book's principal theme is more universal: how little control we have over who we become. Eugenides narrative skillfully reveals how but for this or that event, each of his characters would not be who they are. For example, Cal/Callie would not have been born a hermaphrodite but for her paternal great-grandparents' deaths, her paternal grandfather not having any other attractive woman to marry, a massacre in Turkey, her maternal grandfather's jealousy and doubts of paternity, World War II, etc. The book uses silk cocoons as a metaphor for the tangled histories that make us all who were are, an unwinding string that goes back far beyond our expectations. Though, as one reaches the last quarter of the book, the disparate strands of silk spin together, explaining Cal/Callie's decision to run away and the intertwined fate of her father. I had read this book a couple of month's after reading Gaille's The Law Review, which grappled with this same problem of how much control we have over where we wind up. One passage from that book also rings true for Eugenides' characters in Middlesex, too: "Decision. I think decision itself is a misnomer. It implies that a choice existed for me at the final moment. More often than not, though, one becomes embroiled in adversity not from a single bad decision, but rather from a series of little decisions that were fine when they were made." Such is the fate of us all.

41 of 46 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 4 1/2 * Pulitzer Prize Winner is Excellent, April 4, 2003

By	M. Allen Greenbaum (California) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Middlesex: A Novel (Hardcover)

Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex" belongs to the sprawling intergenerational book genre, but he explores themes with a fresh perspective. Calliope (later Cal) is the omniscient narrator of a story that begins in 1922 Smyrna, Asia Minor and ends almost 80 years later in Berlin. Most of the story takes place in Detroit, a city that he describes with great insight and emotion. Eugenides expertly switches between the voices of the grown-up Cal and the young Calliope; therefore, we experience events as Calliope did, but with the perspective of Cal (at age 40). Calliope is a winning storyteller, observant, funny, and with realistic childhood and adolescent feelings. Throughout the book, Eugenides demonstrates that Callie's circumstances underlie experiences shared by all: Pain, love, confusion, feelings of being both the same as and different from. I think Eugenides somewhat underestimates the emotional toll that Callie's journey would entail, particularly during her long separation from her family as she makes the psychological transformation from Calliope to Cal. Usually; however, the insights and feelings are so true that it reads like an autobiography.

While the story is compelling, there are some problems that interfere with a fluid read. At times, narrative transitions are handled awkwardly through either through over use of ellipses (...) or with somewhat clunky sentences: 'Milton stepped on the gas, ignoring the scarcity not only of petroleum but of many other things as well,' which breaks into a long list of scarce hope, food, phone calls, clean socks, etc. He also overplays his hand at the Greek tragic motif he is constructing ('Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation'!'; though he later, in apparent contradiction, concludes that we can forge our own truer identities) and in his broad caricatures of ethnic and religious types. There's also a sly quality that sets up "surprise" situations: In the most egregious case of 'magical realism,' or just plain gimmickry, Eugenides uses the conceit of using his fictional character 'Jimmy Zizmo' as the 'real' identity of the actual character, Nation of Islam Muslim founder W.D. Farr, and the denouement concerning Calliope's father and uncle lacks credibility. Mostly though, Eugenides' story is compelling and humorous, and he masterfully evokes place and character (industrial Detroit; a hilarious indictment of an ultra-hip 1970s-era surgeon/sexologist), with a casual ease that nicely belies the serious themes.

The book bears some resemblance to Michael Chabon's own Pulitzer Prize winner, "The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay." In both, the immigrant experience and the forging of a new identity are central, characters journey to find their own "American dream," and urban settings help shape their lives. While Chabon is the more nimble phrase writer, Eugenides is similarly poignant and symbolic. Like Chabon, Eugenides uses metaphor (based on reality) as he explores the ideas of being 'different,' the sometimes-artificial nature of boundaries, and the Greek notion of fate. It is an entertaining and often moving story that, despite some minor annoyances, I recommend very highly.