Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

This book was surprising to me; I didn’t know what to expect and had heard very little about it. Apparently, I am in the minority, as it has been a selection for Oprah’s Book Club in the past and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Middlesex is the story of three generations of a Greek-American family living in Detroit as told by Calliope or Cal. Calliope, later Cal is of the youngest generation in the story, raised as a girl, but becoming masculine as an adolescent. Cal is the product of frequent genetic mutations of a close-knit Greek community that hails from a very small town. In 2010, it is no surprise to us that inbred communities tend to have abnormal genetic traits, but of course, Cal’s ancestors had no way of knowing that this would be the case.

As I read this story, I’m tormented not by how unusual and painful Calliope’s puberty is, but how normal and painful it is. How different am I really from Cal? The feeling of alienness in one’s own body, the shame of being imperfect and different from other girls- I don’t think any of this is so unique. Perhaps that is the point; interesex individuals and hermaphrodites aren’t really so different from those of us who only exhibit characteristics of one sex.

The book feels like a cross between Forrest Gump and Lolita, the single male narrator that covers several decades in history while trying to explain a sexual situation that is foreign to most. The book is a startling contrast of the tragic and the comic, and Eugenides himself points out, but that seems to be the case with most things.