Hermaphrodites, incest, boot-legging, illegal immigration…this
might sound like a Jerry Springer episode but we’re actually talking about the
themes in Jeffery Eugenides Pulitzer prize winning novel, Middlesex. In lesser hands,
you might expect a story woven around these elements to rely on shock and novelty
to grab the reader’s attention. But in Eugenides
hands, these are little more than a starting point for an entertaining and provocative
work about our search for identity.
Like so many epic novels Middlesex
is a multi-generational tale of uprooted immigrants creating a new life in a
foreign environment. When Turkish forces
invade the Greek countryside in 1922, Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides are
forced to flee their simple village life and start over in Detroit, USA. Over the next three generations we learn of
the family’s and the city’s intertwined histories, their secrets and their
future. Using prisms of ethnicity, race,
socio-economic grouping and sexual identity Eugenides takes us on a fascinating
tour of a colorful Greek family and the legendary highs and lows of the city of
Motown. Throughout the narrative both
the characters and the city struggle to resist externally imposed identities and
remain true to their heritage in an ever-changing environment.
The protagonist of this tale, Cal, is the granddaughter of
Lefty and Desdemona, and just happens to be a hermaphrodite whose condition
remains undiscovered until her late teens.
You can be forgiven for assuming that this plot element is simply a
gimmick. But it’s not. And the reader is hardly even aware of Cal’s
unusual biology until the latter stages of the book. Instead, when the story finally reaches Cal’s
part in the story, her/his inter-sexed makeup is used as a tool for
deconstructing yet another layer of identity: sex/gender. And what could easily become freakish or even
tawdry is actually quite tender and illuminating.
Eugenides employs science, biology, humor and unwanted
sorrow to handle Cal’s story, deftly balancing these perspectives to create a holistic
vision of an unusual life from birth to middle-age and the perpetual search for
identity. It’s a grossly compelling
vision grounded in the universal need to be accepted -something that is
certainly far more difficult for someone whose physiology does not fit within
the norms of a biology textbook.
At the heart of Middlesex
is an enlarged ensemble of colorful characters that practically jump off the
pages and Eugenides has a knack for capturing the immigrant experience and the reverberations
felt throughout the first, second and even third generation family
members. Throughout this excellent book,
the writing is engaging, the pace is crisp and the characters sparkle. Middlesex
has all the requisite ingredients for an impossible-to-put-down-page-turner and
it does not disappoint.
Eugenides has written just one other book since winning the
2003 Pulitzer, The Marriage Plot (2011),
and previously authored The Virgin Suicides
(1993); both of which have found commercial and critical success. We look forward to reading these other works
and can only hope that we don’t have to wait another decade for his next novel.
