Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Summary
Cal Stephanides, forty one and working for the American diplomatic service in Berlin, sets out to explain how he came to be born a girl and to become a man at fourteen. Doing it properly means starting three generations back, with a recessive gene on the fifth chromosome and a village on Mount Olympus.
His grandparents Desdemona and Lefty are brother and sister. They escape the burning of Smyrna in 1922, and somewhere on the ship to America they decide to arrive as husband and wife. Detroit follows: the Ford English School, rum running across the river during Prohibition, an assembly line, a diner, the Nation of Islam, and the 1967 riot that burns the family business and moves them out to Grosse Pointe.
Callie grows up there, tall and quiet, in love with a schoolfriend she calls the Obscure Object, until a tractor accident sends her to a clinic in New York and a doctor who explains her to herself in language she rejects. She runs, gets as far as San Francisco, and comes back as Cal.
It is long, well over five hundred pages, and it is essentially two books that share a bloodline: a warm comic immigrant epic and a very specific account of adolescence. Detroit is the third main character, followed from the assembly line through the riot to the ruin, and the affection for it is real.
Cal narrates all of it as an adult, which lets him be funny about his own childhood and lets Eugenides announce a family disaster twenty pages before it arrives. Some readers find the omniscience of the early generations a cheat, since Cal cannot possibly know what he describes. He answers the objection himself, more than once, and keeps going. Best for readers who like family sagas and do not mind a narrator who interrupts.
Historical Context & Significance
Middlesex won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It was Jeffrey Eugenides's second novel, published nine years after The Virgin Suicides, and he wrote much of it in Berlin on a fellowship.
Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club in 2007, four years after the prize, which moved it from a well reviewed literary novel to a book several million people owned.
Response from intersex readers and advocates has been mixed and remains worth knowing about. Some welcomed a sympathetic narrator on a scale no previous novel had attempted. Others noted that Cal's specific condition is rare, that the arc of discovery and self naming is one story rather than a representative one, and that the book arrived at a moment when intersex adults were campaigning against surgery performed on infants, a subject the novel touches but does not centre.