Year Published: 2002
When I told my good friend I was in the middle of Middlesex, she remarked, "Oh, good book. The pacing on that last third will kill you, though."
Alas, my friends know me quite well, and she was perfectly correct. The book begins with the following sentence:
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan.
In reaching the first birth, Eugenides has to give us about forty years' worth of family history, beginning with the fraternal grandparents of our narrator, Cal, in their native land of Greece. Then we move into America in the Roaring Twenties, through the Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Detroit Riots, etc. Eugenides' characters are marvelous -- you believe in every single one of them, and you care so much about them that you can't wait to read each of their stories in turn. Additionally, his prose is usually fairly straightforward, but occasionally he throws in gems like this:
. . . I like to imagine my brother and me, floating together since the world's beginning on our raft of eggs. Each inside a transparent membrane, each slotted for his or her (in my case both) hour of birth. There's [my brother], always so pasty, and bald by the age of twenty-three, so that he makes a perfect homunculus . . . . Right nest to him, there's me, his sometime sister, my face already a conundrum, flashing like a lenticular decal between two images: the dark-eyed, pretty little girl I used to be; and the severe, aquiline-nosed, Roman-coinish person I am today. And so we drifted, the two of us, since the world began, awaiting our cues and observing the passing show.
Eugenides works in ideas about masculine and feminine prose, Greek superstition and religion, growing up a hermaphrodite in a time of sexual revolution, race, industrialism, family, and everything else you could want in an epic novel. (It clocks in at 529 pages . . . not quite up to Possession, but damn close. Why have I been choosing all these long books recently? Oh, right, to sufficiently space out the battles in my ongoing war with L.M. Montgomery.)
However, as we move closer and closer to the second birth mentioned in the novel's first sentence, time slows nearly to a halt. We know that Cal will be fourteen when the rebirth occurs, and s/he stays fourteen for . . . a very long time. I lost track, but it had to have been a hundred pages at least. Eugenides teases the reader with canceled OB/GYN appointments and weird sexual encounters -- all of which are very well-written and engaging, but when the reader begins to feel that the revelation is being delayed just for the sake of being delayed, it's not pleasant. You feel as though Eugenides has violated your trust, that he gave you a map ahead of time and neglected to let you know how wacky the scale is.
All this having been said, though, it's really an amazing book, and I'm glad I read it. I must give credit where it's due: Eugenides clearly put a lot of thought and effort into Middlesex, and it shows. Grief about pacing aside, it's a wonderful narrative, and I'm the richer for having read it.
Recommended? Yes. Get ready for a long ride.
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