It won the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards, but this generation of college students kind of missed Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, “Middlesex,” since it came out in 2002. Seven or eight years old at the time, students were still learning about what was acceptable behavior for their own genders, not reading novels about gender identity.
But in today’s open atmosphere, people are a little bit more willing to talk about gender-related issues. In 2012, Eugenides visited USC for its Open Book reading series to discuss his new book that also challenges stereotypical gender roles.
Wesleyan University has been teaching gender-neutral pronouns for 10 years now, and there are over 150 colleges in the country with public gender-neutral bathrooms, according to the Huffington Post. “Middlesex” is a great reminder that gender is not just an academic issue. Since a compassionate understanding of gender is still far from ubiquitous, Euginedes’ novel could be a perfect teacher for those who want help being empathetic toward people they don’t understand.
“Middlesex” is somewhat of an epic, without the intimidation implied by that term. It’s narrated by Cal Stephanides, an intersex man of Greek heritage, working as an American diplomat in Berlin. Cal is born with a genetic mutation that gives him many female characteristics, causing him to be raised as a girl. The novel opens in the 1970s, before Cal’s birth, with his extended family sitting around the kitchen and discussing his conception. From the beginning, Eugenides’s narration is full of playful passages that beg to be shared.
But with the exception of the very beginning, the first half of the story is devoted to Cal’s heritage. This begins in 1922, introducing Cal’s grandparents, who also happen to be siblings, Desdemona and Lefty. They live in the small village of Bithynios in Asia Minor, and emigrate to Detroit when the Turkish army comes to take Smyrna back from the Greeks. On the boat to the U.S., the siblings fall in love and agree to abandon their old identities. They get married, and soon the reader has all but forgotten that their relationship is incestuous. The fact that this is being narrated by Cal, who doesn’t yet exist, is only tangentially referenced.
The story continues throughout the twentieth century, and the plot includes historical elements such as the Detroit race riots and the Watergate scandal. By the time it reaches Cal’s birth, the story almost seems complete without him.
Which is not to say that the second half of the book, in which Cal speaks directly from his own experience, is any less beautiful or thoughtful than the first. As a narrator, he is delightfully thoughtful and irreverent, and he initially tells a standard growing-up-in-1960s-America story in a way that is both perceptive and politically aware. Things begin to change when Cal meets the "Obscure Object," another student in his all-girls school, and falls in love. He starts to realize that because of a combination of society and biology, his life is going to be full of compromises and challenges that most people don’t face. The novel ends on a note that is bittersweet but hopeful.
The biggest triumph of “Middlesex” is how thoroughly it transcends its subject matter. It’s a story about a family history and a unique coming-of-age experience, but also about the themes that show up across familial lines, the genetic component of destiny and the elephant in the room of evolutionary biology that human consciousness might be no more than an advantageous accident. Interestingly, the reader is left with a strong impression that to go through life as only one gender might be to experience life incompletely.