Like the Greek drama cuff links that Cal's father wears, Middlesex has two faces – one comedic, the other tragic – and the novel turns the story of Cal's coming of age into an uproarious epic, at once funny and sad, about misplaced identities and family secrets … Cal (or Calliope, as he was known when he was a girl) is a wonderfully engaging narrator: long-winded, perhaps, but capable of discoursing with equal verve and wit on everything from Greek politics to girls' makeup to the typology of presidential names … Mr. Eugenides has a keen sociological eye for 20th-century American life...But it's his emotional wisdom, his nuanced insight into his characters' inner lives, that lends this book its cumulative power.
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 … 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.
Eugenides’s novel seems itself to be composed of two distinct and occasionally warring halves. One part has to do with hermaphrodites—with Callie’s condition, and how she comes to discover what she ‘really’ is. The other, far more successful part has to do with Greeks—and, in a way, Greekness. Far more colorful than the story of what Callie is, is the story of how she came to be that way—the story of why this child came to inherit the exceedingly rare and fateful gene that ends up defining her indefinable life … A major problem with Middlesex is that there’s nothing all that interesting or distinctive about either half of the main character: one is a fairly ordinary Midwestern girl (except, perhaps, for her growing tendency to develop crushes on other girls), the other an all-too-typically sardonic, post-everything American male.
Funny, humane, endearingly self-aware, Cal takes the book's most potentially alienating feature – it's told by a boy with a vestigial penis who's mistaken for a girl for the first 14 years of his life – and turns it to improbable, wonderful advantage. Here's a novel that emphatically declines to state whether it's a guy book or a chick book. Instead, it's the most reliably American story there is: A son of immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak … [Eugenides’] rarer power resides in the ability to craft scenes whose freshness of incident matches their freshness of description.
At the risk of oversimplifying a book so superabundant with characters, history and incident, the story of Cal Stephanides (nee Calliope), the narrator and protagonist of Middlesex, suggests that while facts can tell us a great deal about life, they are never quite sufficient to the task … Middlesex begins as a generous, tragicomic family chronicle of immigration and assimilation, becomes along the way a social novel about Detroit, perhaps the most symbolic of American cities, and incorporates a heartbreaking tale of growing up awkward and lonely in ’70s suburbia. It’s a big, affectionate and often hilarious book.
Like its hermaphroditic narrator, Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a hybrid—it's at once a Greek-American family saga and a picaresque coming-of-age narrative … Middlesex is consistently whimsical in its scene-setting and use of language, but despite its vaudeville exchanges and niftily isolated punch lines, it's rarely out-and-out funny. The narration is baldly self-conscious in its cleverness … it's off proportionally, both section-to-section and overall, its two halves at odds, each interesting at times but neither truly satisfying, despite Eugenides's prodigious talent.
As it moves through three generations of the Stephanides family, the novel turns out, as if in deference to all those pious post-9/11 editorials, to be almost shockingly unironic, with certain sentences born in a spirit of irony or ambiguity clearly doctored into earnestness … The first half of Middlesex moves at a geological pace, as layer after layer of detail is deposited in our minds … The final eighty pages are exceedingly fine, as Eugenides at last allows his prose to reach for the higher notes … With its heart so clearly in the right place, its taste and intelligence so handsome, Middlesex is a book that’s almost impossible to dislike even as you’re bored by it.
Middlesex is a melting pot in which anything and everything – stylistically, historically, genitally – can be put to some use. But it's like a game of cards where everything's wild. The book is eventful, unpredictable, eager to entertain, but missing the tension a more disciplined approach would have provided … It's a relief, at page 215, when Calliope is born and takes center stage at last. The book accelerates as the heroine – think of someone in a barrel, that strange body, heading toward a waterfall – moves inexorably toward as complicated an adolescence as one can imagine.
Consider Jeffrey Eugenides’ delightfully harmonious Middlesex: Map its genome and you’ll find ancestors as diverse as the case study, the immigrant saga and the sitcom … Middlesex sweeps the reader along with easy grace and charm, tactfully concealing intelligence, sophistication and the ache of earned wisdom beneath bushels of inventive storytelling … Because Cal is so engaging and his transformation so intriguing, it’s easy to forget how broad and crowded Mr. Eugenides’ canvas is. Behind Cal there’s his family (its secret history well concealed), an immigrant success story … The spirit of this novel is anything but polemical-the sumptuous details of daily life distract, and Cal’s descriptive urge takes over.
Middlesex is a multi-generational epic, encompassing a Greek-American immigration tale and a coming-of-age story, all narrated by a hermaphrodite, Cal Stephanides, nee Calliope. Presumably in part because Eugenides was scrambling to fit all these elements into one narrative, the results are uneven, sporadically excellent yet unconvincing on the whole … Cal takes the license of unrealistically omniscient third-person narration, but also incorporates his first-person perspective, punctuating the story with foreshadowing and updates from the present. By the time Cal arrives at the anxiously anticipated point of his own life, he rushes through it, glossing over potentially rich and provocative questions.
[The Virgin Suicides] marked Eugenides as a novelist of voluptuous gifts. Middlesex is a sign he's not sure what to do with them … Some of this footloose book is charming. Most of it is middling.
Middlesex cuts to the titillating chase in the novel's first sentence, but then teasingly meanders … If Middlesex seems top-heavy on the gnarled family tree and skimpy on the fascinating blow-by-blow of Cal's burgeoning sexuality, be assured that Eugenides intends the uneasy balance … Our bodies, Eugenides convincingly argues, are not necessarily our selves. There's the pesky matter of soul to contend with, and, blessedly, Middlesex bestows on Cal Stephanides a rich, complicated, subtle one.
Jeffrey Eugenides has only two books to his name; nevertheless, he's well on his way to becoming a spectacular mythologist, attacking some of our most enduring riddles with heroic energy, keen wit and genuine compassion … [Middlesex is] a novel that's as warm, expansive and generous as its predecessor wasn't … Eugenides has taken the greatest mystery of all –
What are we, exactly, and where do we come from? – and crafted a story that manages to be both illuminating and transcendent. Middlesex isn't just a respectable sophomore effort; it's a towering achievement.
