Review: Middlesex

Some time ago I vowed to read all the unread books on my bookshelf before buying any others.  Amazingly, this seems to be the one self-inflicted principle of discipline I've been able to stick to for more than a few days.  Then again, if all the unread books on my shelf were as good as Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, I'd probably be wrong to call it discipline in the first place.  This is without a doubt the best book I have read in a long, long time.  The only possible contenders that come to mind over the past two years are Unless and The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.  While both are beautiful, eloquent, almost genius novels, however, Middlesex manages to be all those things AND incredibly addictive - a wonderfully rare combination in contemporary fiction, if you ask me.

Middlesex tells the story of Calliope Stephanides, a hermaphrodite who is raised a girl and remains essentially unaware of her unusual genitalia (and, more generally, 'her' male identity) until she reaches puberty.  The story is narrated by Cal, the intelligent, relatively well-adjusted man Calliope grows into.   As he puts it at one point in the novel, "hermaphrodites are people too" - people with families, jobs, and lost loves.  Thus in order to understand who he is, readers must first understand where he came from.  Eugenides does an amazing job of creating Calliope/Cal's character in such a way that readers (or at least this reader) see his status as a hermaphrodite as only part of who he is.  Cal's dual genitalia is not solely and immediately gross or freakish, so much as it is his personal burden - his version of that thing everyone bears in his or her own way.  

Middlesex is also a story about family history and DNA.  More specifically, it explores the tension between preordained fate and self-determination.  How much are we the products of our parents, grandparents, etc, both genetically and culturally?  Can this ever be truly at odds with or different from the lives we choose for ourselves?  Does Cal really choose to live as a man, or was the choice made for him generations ago in a small village in Greece?  I adore novels that can raise questions such as these without sounding self-righteous and preachy.  Middlesex does so beautifully.