She Said, He Said
'Middlesex' by
Jeffrey Eugenides
Reviewed by Lisa Zeidner
Sunday, September
15, 2002; Page BW08
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar Straus Giroux. 529 pp. $27
"Caress the details!" Vladimir Nabokov exhorted his students. His final exams for the course nicknamed Dirty Lit at Cornell would ask students to diagram the layout of Bleak House or identify the pattern of Anna Karenina's bedroom wallpaper. Jeffrey Eugenides's rollicking, gleefully inventive second novel, Middlesex, serves as a tribute to Nabokovian themes. It provides not only incest à la Ada and a Lolita-style road trip, but enough dense detail to keep fans of close reading manically busy.
The novel's heroine, Calliope Stephanides, is born into a Greek family in Detroit in 1960. Callie enjoys a reasonably normal suburban girlhood, unaware of the genetic mutation that will turn her at age 14 into our hero, Cal. "My genitals have been the most significant thing that ever happened to me," Cal reports. "Some people inherit houses; others paintings or highly insured violin bows. . . . I got a recessive gene on my fifth chromosome and some very rare family jewels indeed."
Middlesex cuts to the titillating chase in the novel's first sentence, but then teasingly meanders: back to 1922 in Greece, when Callie's future grandparents, still brother and sister, decamp from tiny Bithynios, only to find themselves fleeing fire in Smyrna; forward to the present in Berlin, where Cal, now a 41-year-old bachelor and State Department employee, tries to muster courage to unveil his freakish genitalia to his new girlfriend. Eugenides chronicles not only seven decades of inbred relations and sundry friends (like the doctor from the Old Country who manages to miss any abnormality both at Callie's birth and at all childhood exams) but all of the cultural high points along the way, from race riots in Detroit to free love in Haight-Ashbury.
The background material is capably handled and engaging enough, especially if you have special interest in either the history of Detroit or Greek immigrant culture. Eugenides can't always reliably distinguish a telling detail from a tedious one. He will devote a paragraph to the décor of a doctor's waiting room even if it "was unexceptional. Chairs lined the walls, divided evenly by magazine tables, and there was the usual rubber tree expiring in the corner." Because of his dogged cataloguing -- or maybe because, in the decade-plus since he published his debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, he has simply gotten better and better -- the novel really picks up about exactly halfway through, when the Stephanideses leave Detroit for the suburb of Grosse Point.
Middlesex is the name of the quirky modernist house the family calls home. But the title also refers to Callie/Cal's intersexual identity. "If you were going to devise an experiment to measure the relative influences of nature versus nurture," s/he confides, "you couldn't come up with anything better than my life." In the heart of the novel, Eugenides recounts the revelation of Callie's genetic abnormality through a series of near-discoveries that are amazingly, comically missed.
Callie doesn't menstruate and hasn't "developed," but couldn't she just be a late bloomer? At puberty, she grows a little mustache, but don't most Greek ladies need hot wax at the beauty salon? She's intensely attracted to girls -- but at her all-girl boarding school, that isn't so unprecedented, either. She remains undetected in the shadowy world of adolescent sexuality -- "Wordless, blinkered, a nighttime thing, a dream thing. . . . It's a kind of fugue state, anyway, early sex."
At 14, Callie finally thuds down at the Sexual Disorders and Gender Identity Clinic in New York. The charismatic Dr. Peter Luce offers a treatment recommendation to Callie's stunned parents similar to the one made by the real sex doctor, John Money, whose harrowing gender experiments were documented in John Colapinto's nonfiction book, As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. But the outcome here is far happier. After all, Cal came of age in the Unisex Decade. Part of the novel's originality is that it celebrates a sexual identity that is not either/or, but both-and. Cal has "the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both."
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. In one wonderful scene, Cal finds himself performing in a San Francisco sexual freak-show called Octopussy's Garden (motto: "Where Gender Is Always on a Bender"), in which customers feed coins into a slot to get tantalizing glimpses through portals of intersexual deformities within. The novel has something of the same veiled feeling. 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. •
Lisa Zeidner, whose most recent novel was "Layover," directs the Graduate Program in English at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J.
