Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Right, what the book's about: You will infallibly pick it up in the first six or eight pages. Come back when you're done.
What strikes me about this Pulitzer Prize novel, instead, is what a profound game the author plays.
The book holds together in a near-Homeric way, dealing with a "character" that could be a Joseph Campbell hero if it were human. The protagonist grows up despite mortal danger, embarks on a journey, faces perils on small and large scales, and in the end achieves a kind of homecoming. The Stephanides family have direct ties to Homer, too, and narrator Cal Stephanides has a special but casual way with omniscience.
Folks, this Greek-American writer has produced an epic, and a good one.
We used to say an epic has unity in that it's about one person; has wide scope in that it takes the person far from home (and may or may not return him there) and in that its action covers a long span of time; employs an ample, mannered and episodic style of storytelling; and brings in actors of high degree (gods and kings, classically).
How does Middlesex work in that frame? First, a family can't occupy the center of a Homeric epic, and this book may seem to be about the Stephanides family, which would disqualify it. I suggest that the family is like those ships run up on the beach before Troy: a conveyance. Where do we find the central character, then? Like others in the book, it has a Greek name: gene. A wonky gene in this case, carrying a recessive trait of hermaphroditism. Its history goes back a few generations; as a recessive character it can manifest itself only under special conditions, and the odd chain of events that brings about those conditions will strike you as no stranger than the way Achilles got his vulnerable heel.
(I didn't mean that. It's totally stranger.)
The gene, or rather its story, begins in Greater Greece, the part of today's Turkey that was de facto Greek land toward the end of the Ottoman empire. Not so terribly far from Troy, indeed. ("Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!" Cal intones.) It escapes a hundred deaths before coming to viability during a refugee voyage. It descends into darkness, only to reappear a couple of generations on, realized in Calliope Stephanides. And in her second life as Cal it finds a resolution after surviving one last terrifying threat.
I think it can be described as an epic hero, if you can just get around the quibble that it isn't a person at all.
Eugenides takes 500 pages to tell the story—that won't seem excessive if you have read the Iliad lately—and as far as form is concerned he meets the criteria of amplitude, manneredness and episodic structure. Actors of high degree? Henry Ford, he ought to do, or the Nation of Islam's Wallace Fard Muhammad. Take all in all, I think we have an epic here. My English professor wife will differ, but she just does that to be perverse.
What I most enjoyed in reading Middlesex was the narrator and his relationship to the "matter" of the narrative. I said Cal was omniscient. More than that: Like Homer, he knows what happened but also has access to the thoughts, memories and drives of characters in present and past. He takes some pains to avoid identifying himself with Calliope, who is near the center of half the book; you can, indeed, point to the moment (it involves a dictionary) when Cal's awareness begins processing Calliope's experiences rather than her living them. Cal makes parallels between himself and Tiresias, the blind prophet. Tiresias saw things he couldn't see, and so does Cal: how his grandparents met, for example, or the scenes his father's mind plays back in the moment of his death. (Cal's explanation that he makes stuff up is, frankly, thin.)
The creation of Cal Stephanides is a tour de force in the same way as that of Humbert Humbert. That act of creation dominates the experience of reading Middlesex in the same way, too. While the epic works, you may find the narrator a greater aspect of the book, as I did. That isn't to detract from the epic any more than a classical scholar would say Homer's narrator gets in between you and Achilles. Far from it: You could boil the action at Troy down into one long chapter, but who would want to read it then? It's Homer in the one case and Cal in the other that makes the book worth reading—and worth talking about.
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Middlesex