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Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides, 2002
544 pp.

In Brief

Pulitizer Prize, 2003

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between themalong with Callie's failure to developleads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.

Spanning eight decadesand one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author

• Birth—March 8, 1960
• Where—Detroit, Michigan, USA
• Education—B.A., Brown University; M.A., Stanford University
• Awards—Whiting Writer's Award, 1993; Guggenheim
   Fellowship, 1994; Pulitzer Prize, 2003
• Currently—lives in Berlin, Germany


Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, the third son of an American-born father whose Greek parents emigrated from Asia Minor and an American mother of Anglo-Irish descent. Mr. Eugenides was educated at public and private schools, graduated from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. Two years later, in 1988, he published his first short story.

Mr. Eugenides' first novel, The Virgin Suicides (FSG), was published in 1993. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review, and Granta. His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the past few years he has been a Fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American Academy in Berlin. Mr. Eugenides now lives in Berlin, Germany, with his wife and daughter.

More
Eugenides has created a singular impression for someone who has published one novel in his whole career -- one novel in the last decade, and very few interviews all the while. He lives in Germany with his family, writes the occasional book review or pop music essay; and nearly ten years after publishing his buzzed-about debut novel The Virgin Suicides, he gets around to offering a second: Middlesex. From the interest surrounding this dilatory sophomore effort, you'd think he'd been in the public eye all along.

His continued cultural currency was doubtless sustained by the 1999 release of Sofia Coppola's stylishly hazy adaptation of The Virgin Suicides; but what else can account for it? His stories, that's what. Eugenides has that Nabokovian gift for combining the prurient with the tragic. The Virgin Suicides was a relatively brief, dreamlike narrative about five sisters in suburban Michigan in the early '70s, all of whom killed themselves. It offers a speedball of irresistible American themes: coming of age in suburbia, family dysfunction, suicide and sex.

With chorus-like narration by the neighborhood boys who lust after the Lisbon girls, the novel earned comparisons to earlier, classical forms. The New York Times' Michiko Kakutani wrote of the novel, "By turns lyrical and portentous, ferocious and elegaic, The Virgin Suicides insinuates itself into our minds as a small but powerful opera in the unexpected form of a novel."

Well received though his first novel was, Eugenides clearly sought to do something more ambitious with Middlesex -- and something more bizarre, hence the aforementioned media interest. Having traversed the awkward terrain of adolescence once already, the author explores the singular discomfort of that period as experienced by a hermaphrodite. Grander in scope than his first novel, Middlesex goes well beyond courting a freak-show curiosity, guided by Eugenides into a person's quest for identity and a family history that begins in Greece, 1922.

So far, Eugenides has shown a definite thematic loyalty that might wear thin in more prolific, less enterprising authors. As it is, he is too original and surprising to dismiss.

Extras
Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything Is Illuminated grew out of his creative writing thesis project, which was advised by Joyce Carol Oates and Eugenides.

Eugenides considered becoming a priest or a monk, and worked alongside Mother Teresa in India for one week during a traveling break from college. He explained to the Calgary Herald, "I was so unformed in my personality and was trying on different personas; being a saint was a bit tight on my shoulders, though. At 20 you can really change your philosophy of the world by reading a single book, or by one chance meeting."

Eugenides, who got the idea for The Virgin Suicides when his nephew's babysitter revealed to him that she and all her siblings had attempted suicide, wrote the book while working as an administrator at the Academy of American Poets in New York. The first chapter was published in the Paris Review in 1991, getting him an agent and, two days later, a book deal.

In a 1995 piece for the New York Times entitled, "Hand Me My Air Guitar: I'm Still a Jethro Tull Fan," Eugenides paid homage to one of his favorite bands. "Being a Tull fan is a chronic condition," he wrote. "As with malaria, a swampiness reclaims the veins without warning."

In a 2004 Barnes & Noble asked various writers what their favorite "summer reads" were. Here's what Jeffrey Eugenides had to say:
      Contrary to the popular idea that summer reading should consist of books that are, well, popular, I've always found summer the perfect season for tackling serious books.

Summer reading assignments at school may have ingrained this habit in me, but I'm glad it's now automatic. Wintry books like Milton's Paradise Lost or Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment keep the mind nice and cool during the dog days.

A friend of mine always gives himself a summer reading project. He reads all of Saul Bellow, say, or all of Proust. If you read junk on the beach, you'll instantly forget it. If you read a classic, it will become part of your achievements that particular summer. Climb Mt. Ranier during the day. Climb Anna Kareninaat night. (Better yet, after breakfast just take Tolstoy into the hammock with an iced coffee and stay there until cocktail hour.)

I have suitably heroic memories of the summer I read The Iliad and The Odyssey back to back. Anything by a Greek makes good summer reading. Ditto, for some strange reason, anything by a Russian. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov is an excellent book to read in transit between a number of cities. The form of the novel, which consists of a line-by-line annotation of a fictional poem, works well when you're stopping and starting.

The Waves by Virginia Woolf is inseparable from a summer I spent in Paris when I was twenty. The music of that very musical book was something that happened to me in Paris; something I did. That's what you should aim for: to have two summers each summer, one of them a literary adventure. The last thing you need on vacation is a vacant mind."

[Right. And...uh, what did YOU read over the summer?]

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Critics Say. . .
… an uproarious epic, at once funny and sad, about misplaced identities and family secrets.... Mr. Eugenides has a keen sociological eye for 20th-century American life.... But it's his emotional wisdom, his nuanced insight into his characters' inner lives, that lends this book its cumulative power.
Michiko Kakutani - The New York Times


Eugenides is one of those rare writers who can manage sympathy and detachment simultaneously-and work small wonders with words while he's at it. As The Virgin Suicides puts its heroines through hell, its readers, weirdly enough, will be delighted."
David Gates - Newsweek


Beautifully written . . . 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."
Publishers Weekly


For the first fourteen years of life, Calliope Helen Stephanides, the narrator and main character of this second novel from the author of The Virgin Suicides, is a coltish schoolgirl, the bright, coddled daughter of a hard-working Greek family who own a chain of hotdog stands in Detroit. But for Calliope, the transformations of puberty do not consist of the usual ripening of womanly curves, but rather the solid musculature, husky voice and nascent mustache of shocking, unsuspected manhood. Named for the muse of epics—of which this wonderful comic novel is surely a modern version—Calliope is the rarest form of hermaphrodite. "Like Tiresias," she explains, "I was first one thing and then the other."

It is this dual viewpoint, as much as the oddity of her experiences, that prompts her to write. "I want to get it down for good: this roller coaster ride of a single gene through time. Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!" Cal bravely declares, adding, "Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic too." It is in fact the first of many classical allusions. Homer called the sea "wine-dark." Landlocked Calliope, as befits her Motor City origins, mentions a "wine-dark Buick." Cal's mock-heroic announcement is the portal into so odd and yet so normal a chronicle of three generations of an American family that readers will find themselves gloating over the book's length and its consequent guarantee of extended pleasure.

The story begins in the tiny Greek village of Bithynios in 1922. Perilously near the Turkish border, it is a center of silkworm cultivation. Here, Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, Calliope's grandparents, growup; and from here they flee to the port of Smyrna, where they precariously survive the sacking of the city by Ottoman troops. During their passage to the United States, the Stephanideses make a rash decision. Acting on an incestuous passion, they start their new life by declaring themselves not brother and sister but husband and wife.

In their commingled genes Calliope's fate is sealed. In the old country, this would be Greek tragedy. But in the America of Eugenides' novel—the land of optimism and self-transformation—consensual incest engenders only slightly more regret than it does in Tom Jones. At one point the author describes a lustful impulse by saying, "It was her body that did it, with the cunning and silence of bodies everywhere." In these pages, human frailty is excusable.

Human tyranny, however, is not. Thus Eugenides ridicules the paternalism of the Ford Corporation—which in its early years inspected workers' homes for signs of loose living, poor hygiene or similar transgressions against the American way of life—as Lefty attends compulsory training at the automobile plant. There he is forced to recite, "Do not spit on the floor of the home" and "The most advanced people are the cleanest." Similarly, the condescending doctor who torments Calliope with tests and seeks to exploit the rarity of her condition is as close as the novel comes to a villain.

In other literatures and cultures, a woman who permits incestuous relations would be an object of condemnation and horror. But a clue to how lightly we are expected to regard Desdemona comes when Eugenides describes the braids emblematic of her nature: "not delicate like a little girl's but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver's tail." The sudden incongruity of the last two words raises the sentence from something one might find in run-of-the-mill magical realism to true, subversive comedy.

Such highly compressed, explosively sudden comparisons are Eugenides' forte. Some are charmingly written, as when Calliope's aunt Zoë sits so meekly in church that "the round gray hat she wore looked like the head of a screw fastening her to her pew." Others have the force of poetry, as when Calliope says of the freckled, red-haired schoolmate whom she secretly adores, "It was like autumn, looking at her. It was like driving up north to see the colors."

When Eugenides deals not in metaphor but in historical detail, he imbues facts with the same piquancy as his imagination. The 1967 Detroit riots that destroy Lefty's cozy, dumpy little restaurant, The Zebra Room, resonate with the Stephanideses' recollection of Smyrna in flames. And consider the antic boldness of making use of the Nation of Islam's Mosque Number One as the setting for the recently emigrated Desdemona's first job, teaching young black women how to make the silk for the congregants' robes.

Even a great-hearted novel such as this one has patches that are marginally less satisfying. Eugenides' home turf is adolescence. Perhaps for this reason, Cal's account of his own middle age in the present day seems dim and perfunctory, a mere episode before we return to the moment when Calliope, now Cal, presents her mother with her new identity.

Their wonderful brief exchange expands a singular genetic event into an inescapable human experience, one that takes place between every child impatient to embrace the future dictated by one's nature, and every parent who shrinks from the inevitable hardships that child must undergo.
Book Magazine


Without a doubt, this audio edition of Eugenides's long-awaited second novel (after The Virgin Suicides) represents an acme of the audiobook genre: the whole equals much more than the sum of its parts. This is simultaneously the tale of a gene passed down through three generations and the story of Calliope Stephanides, the recipient of that gene. Never quite feeling at home in her body, Callie discovered at the age of 14 that she is, in fact, genetically, if not completely anatomically, a boy. From this point on she becomes Cal, and it is Cal, the 41-year-old man, who narrates the story, dipping all the way back in history to the time of his grandparents' incestuous relationship in war-torn Turkey. Tabori's performance of the text is phenomenal. His somewhat high-register, wavering voice, reminiscent of a young Burgess Meredith, is completely convincing as both the young female Callie and the older male Cal. Not only are his interpretations of the characters astonishingly credible, but his internalization of the narrative is nothing short of amazing. Listeners will feel this exhilarating story is being told personally to them for the very first time. Additionally, the intro music at the beginning of each of the 28 sides is different, with each snippet offering a different style of music, reflecting the current timeline and mood of the story. This adds a subtle but wonderful effect.
Publishers Weekly


Eugenides's second novel (after The Virgin Suicides) opens "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl...in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy...in August of 1974." Thus starts the epic tale of how Calliope Stephanides is transformed into Cal. Spanning three generations and two continents, the story winds from the small Greek village of Smyrna to the smoggy, crime-riddled streets of Detroit, past historical events, and through family secrets. The author's eloquent writing captures the essence of Cal, a hermaphrodite, who sets out to discover himself by tracing the story of his family back to his grandparents. From the beginning, the reader is brought into a world rich in culture and history, as Eugenides extends his plot into forbidden territories with unique grace. His confidence in the story, combined with his sure prose, helps readers overcome their initial surprise and focus on the emotional revelation of the characters and beyond. Once again, Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart. Highly recommended. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal

Book Club Discussion Questions

1. Describing his own conception, Cal writes: "The timing of the thing had to be just so in order for me to become the person I am. Delay the act by an hour and you change the gene selection" (p. 11). Is Cal's condition a result of chance or of fate? Which of these forces governs the world as Cal sees it?

2. Middlesex begins just before Cal's birth in 1960, then moves backward in time to 1922. Cal is born at the beginning of Part 3, about halfway through the novel. Why did the author choose to structure the story in this way? How does this movement backward and forward in time reflect the larger themes of the work?

3. When Tessie and Milton decide to try to influence the sex of their baby, Desdemona disapproves. "God decides what baby is," she says. "Not you" (p. 13). What happens when characters in the novel challenge fate?

4. "To be honest, the amusement grounds should be closed at this hour, but, for my own purposes, tonight Electric Park is open all night, and the fog suddenly lifts, all so that my grandfather can look out the window and see a roller coaster streaking down the track. A moment of cheap symbolism only, and then I have to bow to the strict rules of realism, which is to say: they can't see a thing" (pp. 110-11). Occasionally, Cal interrupts his own narrative, calling attention to himself and the artifice inherent in his story. What purpose do these interruptions serve? Is Cal a reliable narrator?

5. "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," Cal writes (p. 217). How does Cal narrate the events that take place before his birth? Does his perspective as a narrator change when he is recounting events that take place after he is born?

6. "All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there's an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell" (p. 20). What does Cal mean by this? Is his manner of telling his story connected to the question of his gender? How?

7. How are Cal's early sexual experiences similar to those of any adolescent? How are they different? Are the differences more significant than the similarities?

8. Why does Cal decide to live as a man rather than as a woman?

9. How does Cal's experience reflect on the "nature vs. nurture" debate about gender identity?

10. Who is Jimmy Zizmo? How does he influence the course of events in the novel?

11. What is Dr. Luce's role in the novel? Would you describe him as a villain?

12. Calliope is the name of the classical Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry. What elements of Greek mythology figure in Cal's story? Is this novel meant to be a new "myth"?

13. How is Cal's experience living within two genders similar to the immigrant experience of living within two cultures? How is it different?

14. Middlesex is set against the backdrop of several historical events: the war between Greece and Turkey, the rise of the Nation of Islam, World War II, and the Detroit riots. How does history shape the lives of the characters in the novel?

15. What does America represent for Desdemona? For Milton? For Cal? To what extent do you think these characters' different visions of America correspond to their status as first-, second-, and third-generation Greek Americans?

16. What role does race play in the novel? How do the Detroit riots of 1967 affect the Stephanides family and Cal, specifically?

17. Describe Middlesex. Does the house have a symbolic function in the novel?

18. "Everything about Middlesex spoke of forgetting and everything about Desdemona made plain the inescapability of remembering," Cal writes (p. 273). How and when do Desdemona's Old World values conflict with the ethos of America and, specifically, of Middlesex?

19. The final sentence of the novel reads: "I lost track after a while, happy to be home, weeping for my father, and thinking about what was next" (p. 529). What is next for Cal? Does the author give us reason to believe that Cal's relationship with Julie will be successful?

20. "Watching from the cab, Milton came face-to-face with the essence of tragedy, which is something determined before you're born, something you can't escape or do anything about, no matter how hard you try" (p. 426). According to this definition, is Cal's story a tragedy?