Middlesex

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (2002), 544pp. Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2003.

After Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I had a difficult time deciding what to read next. I started Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union for the fourth time. As usual, I read about the first six pages, which are fine, and then gave up for no reason at all. The next night I picked up The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time and put it back down within five minutes. I said, "I want to read something short this time."

Yet somehow I still ended up with Middlesex, a book which for me falls into that damning category of “decent” novels—those neither sufficiently objectionable nor captivating. The premise is good: Middlesex follows Calliope “Cal” Stephanides, its hermaphroditic narrator, as he traces the history of his big fat Greek family from his grandparents' immigration in 1922 to the present of the book. It is a historical as well as a historiographical novel, since Cal’s story is not an extant genealogy but actually the creation of one. And as this is also a bildungsroman, it is only natural that Cal’s attempt to make sense of his family history is also intimately tied up with and eventually key to coming to terms with his gender identity.

Middlesex attempts to pull off a lot: it’s a book about the immigrant experience, the American experience, about growing up, and about what it means to be an individual inscribed as we all are within the bounds of history and biology. To give Eugenides credit, the book succeeds in a lot of this.  The plot moves along nicely, and the historical perspective is interesting and richly textured. Like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugenides does a thorough job documenting the material history of the setting. As one example, the novel painstakingly describes the different cars driven by Cal’s father, Milton, at different junctures in the book, a vivid way of reflecting the economic fortunes of the family and changing aesthetics of midcentury styles while paying homage to the novel’s Detroit locale.

But for all Middlesex does well, there is one thing that keeps me from saying without qualification that I liked it: Cal Stephanides. Quite frankly, I found Cal to be an irritating narrator. Within the traditional framework of the book, Cal’s narration came off—to me at least—as too self-conscious, too self-reflexive. Invariably, whenever I was becoming engrossed in the story, the objective narration would break, and there would be Cal with some kind of digression or interjection reminding you just who was telling the story, like a puppet master making it clear who was pulling the strings.

I doubt it really would have worked for this story, but in theory I imagine that I might have liked the novel better had it been written in third person. Aside from what I felt to be the annoyingly “showy” quality of Cal’s narration, I also ended the book feeling he couldn’t plausibly have known all the information that was the story itself. Is it asking for an inordinate level of realism to suggest that a narrator’s authority to tell his own story should be reasonably accounted for within the book? Is this supposed to fall under “willing suspension of disbelief”?

Clearly a number of people have disagreed with me that Middlesex’s narration is a problem. In fact, a number of very powerful people (within the literary world at least) got together to award it the Pulitzer Prize in 2003. A book jacket commentator even declared that “Cal is a wonderfully engaging narrator.” They had their say; now I’m having mine. So the bottom line is this: I wouldn’t tell anyone not to read this book. I know a few people who have liked it. But for me—because I’ll be the first to admit what books a person likes is very frequently a matter of taste rather than merit—Middlesex was a disappointingly so-so read.