What a delight for me as a reader: A Pulitzer Prize winning book set in my hometown, Detroit. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides is a fabulous tour of the place I knew as a child and young adult. This tour comes along for the ride as part of a grand tale about finding and accepting one's identity.
The narrator of the book, Cal, is feeling a rebirth coming one. It will be his third birth. The second one occurred at the age of 14 when he discovered that he was not really a girl. Cal is hoping that this third birth will help him come to terms with his unique hermaphroditic self and clear the way for him to have a successful relationship with a women. And good news, that woman just showed up.
This three-generation tale begins with protagonist Cal/Callie's grandparents surviving the burning of Smyrna on the shifting Greco-Turkish border. The grandparents are brother and sister but unaware of the genetics that cause strange mutations to occur in close-blood relationships, they marry and have children. Fast forward twenty years to Detroit, their daughter marries her second cousin and the recessive gene for a hermaphroditic condition comes alive in their second-born child, Callie. The doctor that delivers Callie has poor vision and poor instincts and so no one knows that Callie is not built like other girls.
Eugenides takes his time telling the tale starting in grandparents' village on Mt. Olympus to their escape from burning Smyrna and journey to US, landing as all immigrants do in Ellis Island. We learn about what an immigrant family must do to stay alive during the depression and how prohibition was the right ingredient for a certain small business to thrive. He takes us into the fifties and sixties as a family restaurant comes alive and then is burned to the ground in the Detroit riots. We watch young Callie grow up unaware of her condition, first in historic Indian Village in Detroit and then in upper class Gross Pointe where she watches her friends bloom into beautiful young girls. As Callie's voice gets lower and her body grows tall but remains free of curves, she begins to wonder about herself. She becomes especially worried when she feels the all-too-physical pangs of love for her best friend. An accident lands her in the emergency room, where a surprised doctor sees what no one else before him has seen - that Callie is actually a boy. The reader, who has known this for 400 pages finally takes a breath.
The last 150 pages of the book describe the weeks and months after the fateful day in the emergency room. Callie takes it upon herself to make the necessary transitions to become Cal without the intervention of parents or doctors by running away to California. He first hooks up with teenage Dead-heads, then makes a living as a freak in a burlesque show. This second birthing lasts about 5 months. Cal is busted and sent home, where he assumes his role of second son in the family. Eugenides' tale ends here. We are spared scenes depicting the taunts of Cal's classmates which he tossed away with a line on page 1. We are also spared the anguish of his young adult years as he unsuccessfully tries to create relationships with women. But we do get glimmers of the third birthing at the beginning of each chapter and share his hope that this birth is a keeper.
Some are calling this a Great American novel ala Huckleberry Finn. One can make a good case for that with the novel's deep look at ethnicity, race relationships, incest and gender identity. Through Cal's family's eyes, we witness the depression, the race riots, the Vietnam War and the hippie era in California. The book's breadth is huge.
I read Middlesex as a breather book between heady Time 100 books. It has done its job and "wiped the palate" clean after my reading Never Let Me Go and watching the film Naked Lunch. I am now ready to pick up Beloved. But I don't mean to imply that Middlesex is a light book. It is a full, ripe novel that, like Ragtime, is a big treat to read.
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