by Michiko Kakutani
As his deft first novel, ''The Virgin Suicides'' (1993), attested, Jeffrey Eugenides has an operatic imagination, inclined toward the melodramatic and the bizarre. That novel opened with the shocking image of a 13-year-old girl hurling herself out a window and impaling herself on a fence. His impressive new novel, ''Middlesex,'' gets off to an equally startling start with the announcement by its narrator, Cal, that he is a hermaphrodite, born in 1960 as a darling baby girl and reborn in 1974 as an awkward teenage boy.
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. The book displays the same sort of knowing portraits of adolescence that ''Virgin Suicides'' did, but this novel is at its most incisive not as a bildungsroman about teenage angst and gender confusion, but as a ''Buddenbrooks''-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream.
It is a novel that employs all its author's rich storytelling talents to give us one Greek-American family's idiosyncratic journey from the not-so-pearly gates of Ellis Island to the suburban vistas of Grosse Pointe, Mich., while at the same time tracing the rise and fall in fortunes of Detroit, from its apotheosis as the Motor City in the 40's and 50's through the race riots of 1967 and its subsequent decline. It is also a novel that invokes ancient myths and contemporary pop songs to show how family traits and inclinations are passed down generation to generation, a novel that uses musical leitmotifs to show the unexpected ways in which chance and fate weave their improvisations into the loom of family life.
Part Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, 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. Claiming he possessed fetal omniscience of the world before he was born, he discourses with complete authority about his relatives' past, limning their secrets and their dreams while pointing out coincidences and parallels in their lives, like an old-fashioned storyteller privvy to the playful machinations of the gods.
Cutting back and forth in time to build suspense, Cal juxtaposes his own story with that of his paternal grandparents' courtship and marriage, which, he explains, contains the seeds of his own fate. Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, we learn, are not only husband and wife, but also brother and sister, who in 1922 fled their small village, as fighting between Greek and Turkish troops reached their mountainside home. They witnessed the terrible burning of Smyrna that autumn and managed to escape on a boat to America by lying about their pasts. The trauma of witnessing so much death and destruction helped ease their guilt over their incestuous romance, and on shipboard they prepared for their new lives in America by inventing new identities for themselves.
Mr. Eugenides has a keen sociological eye for 20th-century American life; he even reads an assimilationist lesson in the elder Stephanides's decision to furnish their bedroom with a ''Monticello'' dresser and a ''Mount Vernon'' mirror. But it's his emotional wisdom, his nuanced insight into his characters' inner lives, that lends this book its cumulative power. He has not only followed up on a precocious debut with a broader and more ambitious book, but in doing so, he has also delivered a deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century.
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As his deft first novel, ''The Virgin Suicides'' (1993), attested, Jeffrey Eugenides has an operatic imagination, inclined toward the melodramatic and the bizarre. That novel opened with the shocking image of a 13-year-old girl hurling herself out a window and impaling herself on a fence. His impressive new novel, ''Middlesex,'' gets off to an equally startling start with the announcement by its narrator, Cal, that he is a hermaphrodite, born in 1960 as a darling baby girl and reborn in 1974 as an awkward teenage boy.
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. The book displays the same sort of knowing portraits of adolescence that ''Virgin Suicides'' did, but this novel is at its most incisive not as a bildungsroman about teenage angst and gender confusion, but as a ''Buddenbrooks''-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream. It is a novel that employs all its author's rich storytelling talents to give us one Greek-American family's idiosyncratic journey from the not-so-pearly gates of Ellis Island to the suburban vistas of Grosse Pointe, Mich., while at the same time tracing the rise and fall in fortunes of Detroit, from its apotheosis as the Motor City in the 40's and 50's through the race riots of 1967 and its subsequent decline. It is also a novel that invokes ancient myths and contemporary pop songs to show how family traits and inclinations are passed down generation to generation, a novel that uses musical leitmotifs to show the unexpected ways in which chance and fate weave their improvisations into the loom of family life.
Part Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, 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. Claiming he possessed fetal omniscience of the world before he was born, he discourses with complete authority about his relatives' past, limning their secrets and their dreams while pointing out coincidences and parallels in their lives, like an old-fashioned storyteller privvy to the playful machinations of the gods.
Cutting back and forth in time to build suspense, Cal juxtaposes his own story with that of his paternal grandparents' courtship and marriage, which, he explains, contains the seeds of his own fate. Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, we learn, are not only husband and wife, but also brother and sister, who in 1922 fled their small village, as fighting between Greek and Turkish troops reached their mountainside home. They witnessed the terrible burning of Smyrna that autumn and managed to escape on a boat to America by lying about their pasts. The trauma of witnessing so much death and destruction helped ease their guilt over their incestuous romance, and on shipboard they prepared for their new lives in America by inventing new identities for themselves.
***
Mr. Eugenides has a keen sociological eye for 20th-century American life; he even reads an assimilationist lesson in the elder Stephanides's decision to furnish their bedroom with a ''Monticello'' dresser and a ''Mount Vernon'' mirror. But it's his emotional wisdom, his nuanced insight into his characters' inner lives, that lends this book its cumulative power. He has not only followed up on a precocious debut with a broader and more ambitious book, but in doing so, he has also delivered a deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century.
Read more:
