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.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005), 326pp. 

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is the kind of book I read for—the kind that I’m excited to pick up, hate to put down, and saddened when it's over. The film version (apparently the worst-reviewed movie ever to be nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, but more about that later) was released last winter, so I don't think I'm giving too much away by revealing that the book follows Oskar Schell, a nine-year-old boy whose father died in the World Trade Center attacks, on his mission to find the lock that fits a mysterious key he found in his father's closet.

Let's talk about Oskar. American literature has a long tradition of memorable child/adolescent narrators—Huckleberry Finn, Scout Finch, Holden Caulfield—and Oskar is right up there. Oskar is exceptionally precocious, a lover of French and admirer of Stephen Hawking, whom he repeatedly writes requesting to become his protégé. Most reviewers agree that Oskar has some kind of developmental disorder along the autism/Asperger's spectrum, but the book only hints at this. He also shows signs of obsessive compulsive tendencies, especially a tendency to fixate on unpleasant thoughts, like whether the body falling from the World Trade Center in a picture he keeps in his notebook is his father's. But more than anything, Oskar impresses the reader as charming and sensitive, a dynamic personality that Safran Foer manages to make believably sophisticated without losing the naïveté and idealism of childhood.

There's little doubt in my mind that Oskar's narration makes the book. Certainly it (the book, that is) has lots of other stuff going for it—an engaging plot, complexly rendered characters across the board, and a really interesting utilization of visual elements like pictures and typeface, which reproduce items that exist in the world of the story (including Oskar's "Stuff that Happened to Me" notebook) in the book itself. But what makes the book touching rather than just technically adroit is Safran Foer's virtuoso crafting of Oskar's voice and perspective.

That, and also this: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is best known at a 9/11 novel—an ambitious enough theme in itself—but its scope is even larger than that. Safran Foer's meditation on 9/11 and its aftermath is deepened by its juxtaposition with the bombing of Dresden and its aftermath, brought into the story via a subplot involving Oskar's paternal grandparents, whose letters are interpolated throughout Oskar's narration. Through the exploration of these two events and their interconnections, the book takes on questions of 1) how and to what extent we can access, contain, or transmit the experience of trauma through language and 2) whether and to what extent an attempt at this might have the power to heal us.

As I mentioned, the 2011 film is reportedly the worst-reviewed Oscar nominee to date, with a solidly rotten 47% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But that is not the reason I didn't see it. I am often a fan of cinematic adaptations of books I like (I'm already beside myself with anticipation for Baz Luhrman's remake of The Great Gatsby, one of my very favorite books of all time), but for me, part of what Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is "about" is the role of writing as a way of reclaiming or connecting with painful experiences that could never otherwise be given voice in our everyday lives. So I happen to think this story reached the apotheosis of its telling in novelistic form; I just don't think it could be done as well through the cinematographer's lens.

I would love to say more about why Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is such a beautiful and sad and fantastic book, but I would only end up copying it word for word in its entirety. So in order to save your eyes and myself from copyright infringement, I'm just going to recommend that you pick it up for yourself.