BOOK REVIEW: Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex

Finally buckled down and read Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex awhile back as part of gay male book club. It was quite interesting to read this fictionalization of a child of Greek immigrant parents who experiences firsthand knowledge that sex is not always a binary selection between male and female.

I had heard many things about Middlesex because it had won the Pulitzer Prize and was about topics that I am interested in: immigrant life, sex, gender and sexuality.

The book is about the life of Cal Stefanides, who is born as an intersexed individual due to the unwitting coupling of two generations of his immediate relatives.

The part of the book which deals with the travails of Cal's grandparents travels from a little town in Greece to the big city of Detroit, MI are one of the highlights of the book for me. Eugenides portrays a lightly fictionalized account of various important historical events in Detroit in particular and the United States in general during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

Cal doesn't make an appearance in the book until almost the halfway point, and then "he" appears as Calliope. Because of an inattentive, near-senile family physician and indeterminate genitalia, Cal is raised as a girl for the first 16 years of his life, and we (the reader) are given a first-person account of what it is like for a heterosexual person to grow up in a body whose body and surroundings represent a gender different from the gender in their mind.

I know that some people had problems with the heteronormative world-view of a novel which is asking the reader to be mentally flexible about sex and gender. However, I am sympathetic to Eugenides not necessarily wanting to complicate the issues he was portraying by including sexual orientation into the mix. However, I do agree with his critics' point that at the very least the author could have been more nuanced in his approach to sexual orientation.

It's definitely true, that for me, the book does not end well and really starts going down hill when the main character of Calliope is introduced. However, as an intoxicating melange of historical fiction and teenage coming-of-age tale, Middlesex is not a book you will soon forget.

Title: Middlesex.
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides.
Paperback: 544 pages.
Publisher: Picador.
Date: June 5, 2007.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.67/4.0).
PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: B+.
WRITING: A.