'Middlesex' may be an entirely different sort of book -- it's longer,
more discursive and funnier, for a start -- but
it's equally
preoccupied with rifts. There's the gap between male and female,
obviously, but also between Greek and WASP, black and white, the old
world and the new, the silver spoon and the sluggish sperm. Finally,
there is the tug of war between destiny and free will -- an age-old
concern of Greek storytellers, as every college freshman learns, reborn
in the theories advanced by evolutionary psychology.EVEN before she's born, Calliope Stephanides's gender is up for
debate. Her parents, Milton and Tessie Stephanides of Detroit, want a
girl, and a bachelor uncle convinces Milton, ostensibly on the
authority of an article in Scientific American magazine, that if the
couple have 'sexual congress' 24 hours prior to ovulation 'the swift
male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggish but
more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped.' Tessie complies,
despite her worries that 'to tamper with something as mysterious and
miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris.' Once Tessie
is pregnant, Milton's mother, Desdemona -- a refugee with her husband,
Lefty, from a Greek village on the slopes of Mount Olympus -- dangles a
silver spoon tied to a string over the belly of her daughter-in-law and
pronounces the child a boy. Her son storms in to protest the
divination; the baby is a girl, he insists. 'It's science, Ma.' They're
both right, after a fashion. Callie will spend the 1960's and early
70's, the first years of her life, as the relatively unremarkable
daughter of an entrepreneurial Greek-American family, only to discover
at 14, in the office of a Manhattan physician, that she is a
hermaphrodite -- or, more precisely, a pseudohermaphrodite, a sufferer
of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. 'To the extent that fetal
hormones affect brain chemistry and histology, I've got a male brain,'
explains Cal, the man Callie decides to become after she learns the
truth and the narrator of 'Middlesex,' Jeffrey Eugenides's expansive
and radiantly generous second novel. 'But I was raised as a girl.' 'Middlesex' is also a coming-of-age story, albeit an exceptionally
fraught one, as it gradually dawns on the adolescent Callie that
there's something seriously odd about her body -- and that she's
besotted with a female classmate. There's a bit of road novel as well,
when, enlightened as to the actual state of his chromosomes, Cal
hitchhikes to -- where else? -- San Francisco. And, finally, there's
the sliver of a love story, as the now 41-year-old Cal, ensconced in a
safely nomadic State Department career, gingerly courts a
Japanese-American photographer, wondering if he can trust her with the
surprise between his legs. Eugenides pitches a big tent, but
one of the delights of 'Middlesex' is how soundly it's constructed,
with motifs and characters weaving through the novel's various
episodes, pulling it tight. The young Armenian doctor who saves Lefty
in Smyrna and sees his own children butchered by Turkish soldiers
becomes the aged, bleary-eyed family retainer who overlooks Callie's
unusual anatomy. Middlesex, the modern house the Stephanideses manage
to purchase in the exclusive suburb of Grosse Pointe (it's too peculiar
and unfashionable to sell to WASPs) is 'like communism, better in
theory than reality.' Which makes it also like the blank-slate notion
of gender identity advanced by the doctor who wants to drag Cal under
the knife. And while some of the odds and ends Eugenides tosses
into the mix (a disquisition on Michael Dukakis, a supporting
character's bizarre connection to the Nation of Islam) don't quite
integrate, far moreeenage Desdemona's braids as 'not delicate like a
little girl's but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a
beaver's tail,' for example, the metaphor has an elemental eroticism
worthy of Hardy. Because it's long and wide and full of stuff,
'Middlesex' will be associated by some readers with books by David
Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, brilliant members of Eugenides's
cohort. Those writers, however, have more satirical, even
self-lacerating inclinations; there can be an air of penance to their
work (as there is to 'The Virgin Suicides'). Here, at least,
Eugenides is sunnier; the book's length feels like its
author's arms
stretching farther and farther to encompass more people, more life. His
narrator is a soul who inhabits a liminal realm, a creature able to
bridge the divisions that plague humanity, endowed with 'the ability
to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of
one sex but in the stereoscope of both.' That utopian reach makes
'Middlesex' deliriously American; the novel's patron saint is Walt
Whitman, and it has some of the shagginess of that poet's verse to go
along with the exuberance. But mostly it is a colossal act of
curiosity, of imagination and of love.GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.