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Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Pulitzer Prize

Buy at Amazon: Middlesex

Description: Cal, an intersex (hermaphrodite), is thought to be a girl at birth and later identifies as a male from adolescence on.  Now in his early 40s, he examines his life and the lives of his Greek-American ancestors in order to put his strange story into perspective in this Pulitzer-Prize winning novel.

Objectionable Material:  Occasional profanity, mild occasional sex scenes, brief graphic violence in the Smyrna massacre section

Review: Middlesex is well-written in a clear, if rambling, style. But it's very long-winded and stuffed with every heartwarming Greek-American anecdote imaginable.  The extremely slender plot of Cal coming to an understanding of himself can barely support all the re-enactments of the Stephanides family history. There are some first-rate sections such as the one describing the Detroit riots.  But if you're picking up the book to read about Cal being a hermaphrodite, you're going to have to plow first through hundreds of pages about his grandparents' immigrant experience and his parents' World War Two experience.  Plus his own schooldays as a girl, which span countless pages, are unremarkable.  I recommend Middlesex, but not overwhelmingly.

Theme: Be true to yourself and acknowledge everything that has gone into the making of you.

Title: Middlesex is the name of the exclusive suburb to which the Stephanides family moves when they've finally achieved the American dream, but it also refers to Cal's unique status as an intersex, or hermaphrodite, who simultaneously stands between, and is a merging of, the male and female sexes.

Characters:

• Father Mike – priest infatuated with Tessie Stephanides
• Julie Kikuchi – present day woman in Berlin to whom Cal is attracted
• Philobosian, Dr. – Armenian man who escaped Smyrna with Desdemona and Lefty
• Stephanides, Cal – born in 1960; now 41 years old. Narrator.
• Stephanides, Chapter Eleven – Cal's older brother. His name is never explained.
• Stephanides, Desdemona – Cal's paternal grandmother
• Stephanides, Lefty – Cal's paternal grandfather
• Stephanides, Milton – Cal's father
• Stephanides, Tessie – Cal's mother and daughter of Lina
• Stephanides, Zoe – sister of Milton and aunt to Cal
• Zizmo, Jimmy – Lina's mysterious husband
• Zizmo, Lina (aka Sourmelina) – lesbian cousin in Detroit of Desdemona and Lefty

Viewpoint: First-person in Cal's sections, third-person when he's recreating his relatives' stories.

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Plot Summary with Spoilers: (brought to you by kat impatientreader.com)  Cal, named Calliope at birth, decides to tell his story as a hermaphrodite, which includes his family's Greek immigrant heritage. 

Cal starts in rural Greece in 1922 in the viewpoint of his paternal grandmother, Desdemona whose parents were killed in the recent Turkish conflict.  She's 21, earning a living as a silkworm farmer and trying to line up a wife for her dreamy 20 year-old brother Lefty. Finally the siblings realize they're in love with each other.  But then the Turks attack and lay waste to the Greek countryside.

Desdemona and Lefty flee to the city of Smyrna where they and an Armenian Dr. Philobosian manage to escape the Turkish massacre  and set sail for the United States. On board the ship, Lefty and Desdemona get married and start living as a couple. They get separated from Dr. Philobosian in New York City, and they travel to their cousin Lina in Detroit who has agreed to sponsor them.  She's the only one left who knows they're siblings and they swear her to secrecy.  Her older husband Jimmy is a secret bootlegger of liquor, smuggling it in from Canada during Prohibition.

Lefty works briefly with at the Ford Motor Company, and then joins Jimmy with the bootlegging. Desdemona and Lina get pregnant with their first children. Dr. Philobosian shows up to start his medical practice in Detroit and becomes the family doctor. Desdemona worries that her incestuous baby will be born with birth defects.  Jimmy Zizmo worries that Lina's baby isn't his. 

The same night the women have their babies in the hospital, Jimmy drives Lefty out on the ice of Lake St. Clair, supposedly on another bootlegging run into Canada.  In reality, he suspects that Lefty is the father of Lina's baby and interrogates him while driving fast to scare him.  Lefty denies everything and jumps from the car, which cracks through the ice and vanishes with Jimmy. Meanwhile, Lina has a girl Tessie and Desdemona has a boy Milton who will grow up and get married to each other. The family holds Jimmy's funeral thought they never recover his body.

Lefty opens a restaurant and secret speakeasy called the Zebra Room. The women raise the children, Tessie and Milton. Desdemona has a daughter, Zoe. The Great Depression begins and Lefty, who is working 16-hour days trying to keep the Zebra Room afloat, insists that Desdemona get a job while Lina takes care of the kids. Desdemona finds a classified ad for "silk worker" which leads her to the black section of Detroit and a building owned by the newly formed Nation of Islam. They hire her as a silkworm farmer and seamstress of silk garments.

While working, Desdemona listens through the air vents to Minister Fard's anti-white lectures, and feels increasing guilt over her incestuous marriage. She decides to get her tubes tied by Dr. Philobosian. Then, in the wake of murder and scandal, Minister Fard hands over leadership of Nation of Islam to his successor Elijah Muhammad. Minister Fard speaks briefly with Desdemona before disappearing forever, and she realizes to her great shock that he is actually the long-lost Jimmy Zizmo.

Next, it's 1944 and Milton and Tessie are young adults, falling in love and bonding over their shared interest in music.  Desdemona, ever worried about incest, tries to sabotage their relationship by getting seminary student Father Mike to court an ambivalent Tessie.  When Tessie unenthusiastically accepts Father Mike's proposal, Milton enlists in the navy to fight the Japanese. When he survives the war, Desdemona is so grateful that she ceases to oppose the marriage. Tessie breaks it off with Father Mike and marries Milton.  Father Mike marries Milton's sister Zoe.

Cal summarizes the next few years: his dad's naval career necessitates Tessie and Milton moving from base to base.  Chapter Eleven, a normal male, gets born. Milton brings his family home to Detroit where Lefty still tends to the failing Zebra Room.

Milton remodels the Zebra Room, turning it into a diner. He takes over, pushing 54 year-old Lefty into retirement.  Bored, Lefty takes up gambling and manages to lose his and Desdemona's life savings.  They have to sell all their possessions and move to the attic apartment of Milton's big house. On Greek Easter of 1959, Tessie and Milton conceive Cal whom they hope will be a girl. Cal gets born, looking like a girl, and receives the name Calliope, or Callie.

Callie grows up as a girl and witnesses the race riots in Detroit in 1967. Milton loses the diner in the fires of the riots, but collects on the insurance and moves the family to the exclusive Middlesex suburb.  Lefty has several strokes and then dies.  Desdemona takes to her bed, never to leave it again. Callie grows up as a girl, half-conscious of her attraction to other girls. Milton starts the Pillars of Hercules hotdog stand franchise that will compete successfully with McDonalds' Golden Arches.

The years pass and the Vietnam War ends. Chapter Eleven goes to college, turns into a hippie, and starts taking LSD. Milton and Chapter Eleven get in serious arguments about everything.  Callie is now a 14 year-old in high school: a tall, long-haired girl who retains her boyish figure and has never had a period.  She develops a huge crush on a schoolmate whom she refers to in retrospect only as That Obscure Object of Desire or The Obscure Object for short. 

One summer she goes on vacation with the Obscure Object's family to their summer house.  The Object saddens her by flirting with Rex, an obnoxious boy from school whose family summers nearby.  When the Object has sex with Rex, Callie has sex with the Object's brother Jerome.  It's brief and painful. At that moment, Callie realizes that she's a hermaphrodite, but Jerome notices nothing. Callie begins sneaking into the Object's bed by night, and the Object lets Callie fondle her. They continue their secret love affair until Jerome figures it out and accuses them of being lesbians.  Callie fights him and then runs away, crashing into a tractor in a nearby field. When the emergency room doctors examine Callie and notice her intersex genitals, they tell her parents. 

Callie's concerned parents take her to New York City to see the world-renowned gender identity specialist Dr. Luce.  He studies Callie for two weeks, during which time she becomes famously if anonymously documented for textbooks.  She answers all his questions truthfully except for the ones concerning sexual orientation:  out of shame, she lies and claims to be attracted to males. 

Dr. Luce determines that Callie is genetically male but looks more female and has been raised a female and therefore has the gender identity of a female. He proposes an operation to make her genitals look female, and then starting her on female hormones.  Callie secretly reads her medical chart and comes to the conclusion that she's a boy.  That night when her parents want to go to a Broadway show, she stays behind in the hotel room.  She takes money from her dad's wallet, leaves her parents a note saying she has to run away, and leaves the hotel room.

Cal hitchhikes west, remaking himself as a male. He gets a haircut and a suit and practices walking and talking like a male. His final ride in to San Francisco is from Bob Presto, an entrepreneur in the porn business who guesses that Cal is a transsexual and tries to talk Cal into coming to work for him. Instead, Cal brushes him off and starts living with some street kids in Golden Gate Park.  But then he gets attacked by two homeless men who think he's a girl in disguise and try to rape him.  As soon as they expose his intersex genitals they freak out and beat him up and urinate on him.  When he regains consciousness, Cal gives Bob Presto a call.

Bob Presto puts Cal to work in his stripper/sex club, swimming in a tank and showing off his intersex genitals to paying observers. All of Cal's quirky coworkers are unusual: transsexuals and transvestites.  He spends the next four months doing this and living with one coworker, another hermaphrodite. He starts to explore and grow comfortable with his identity as an intersex. Then the sex club gets raided by the police and Cal and the others get tossed in jail. Cal uses his one phone call to reach his brother Chapter Eleven who tells him there has been an accident and Milton is dead.

Then Cal reconstructs his father's final days. In 1975 Milton starts getting crank calls from someone claiming to have kidnapped Callie and wanting a ransom.  The kidnapper knows obscure details about the Stephanides family that only a close family member like Callie could have provided. Without consulting Tessie, Milton goes out to the train station to leave the ransom in a specified trash can. But he secretly hangs around to get a look at the kidnapper.

It turns out to be Father Mike who has always secretly hated Milton for stealing Tessie and achieving business success.  Milton and Father Mike run to their respective cars.  Milton chases Father Mike to the bridge that leads over the river from Detroit to Canada, but loses control during the chase and drives off the bridge, plummeting to his death in the river. Father Mike winds up in the hospital and then in prison.

Cal returns home where the remaining Stephanides family tearfully hear his story and accept him as he is. They get ready for Milton's funeral. Cal goes up to the attic where Desdemona has been living all this time. Shocked at his masculine appearance, she mistakes him for young Lefty.  Then she recognizes him as Calliope who used to be her granddaughter. Cal tells her his story. Then Desdemona confesses the truth of her incestuous marriage with Lefty and the final piece falls into place in the puzzle of how Cal turned out the way he did. The book ends with Cal keeping the traditional Greek funeral vigil at the front door of the house, and thinking about his father.

Noteworthy Links:

   Wonderquest - Science Q/A! The Connection - Tech blog! Author site - John the Eunuch Historical Mystery series, Cozy Mystery List for all your cozy mystery needs, Obsidian Bookshelf - reviews of gay-themed fiction. Impatient Reader is not responsible for content found through offsite links.