If males write prose in a linear-masculine style and females tend to adopt a circular narrative, is this a result of testosterone or gender upbringing? In the nature versus nurture battle, Jeffrey Eugenides' newest, \Middlesex,"" eventually rests in the nature camp. But if the prose oscillates between linear and circular it is because Eugenides creates a narrator who defies nature and nurture, a narrator who is both man and woman.
Almost 10 years have passed since the debut of ""The Virgin Suicides,"" a critical darling whose success was recently augmented by Sofia Copola's faithful film adaptation. Set in a 1970s Detroit suburb, ""Suicides"" chronicled the obsessions of a group of teenage boys, a disembodied ""we"" narrator and the object of their desire--the five Lisbon sisters, troubled and doomed, who haunt the boys even in adulthood.
In ""Middlesex,"" Eugenides returns to the '70s and the suburbs, but only after dragging the reader through Greece, both World Wars and the Detroit Race Riots. His sophomore effort is a sprawling, 500-page family saga, centering on the hermaphrodite narrator who begins life as the girl Callie and is later rechristened Cal. Grounded in Detroit history and allusion to Grecian myth, the prose of ""Middlesex"" moves away from the reticent lyricism of ""Suicides.""
Now Eugenides leaves no enigmas on the page. Cal tells the story from an omniscient perspective and these characters are open, optimistic and able to move on.
""I was born twice,"" Cal says. The same can be said for ""Middlesex."" The book majestically rises from its own ashes and becomes engaging around page 300 when Cal finally emerges as our focal point. Before this ""Middlesex"" is the story of Cal's parents, grandparents and their respective romances. These pairings are interesting for various reasons but neither is compelling in a way that justifies eating up more than 200 pages of space while the reader waits for the real story to begin.
It is after Cal makes an entrance that the reader hits pay dirt. Both hero and heroine, Cal begins with only the dilemmas of an after-school special teen--battling an awkward stage and suffering through puppy love--but is soon posing nude for transgender textbooks and starring in a hermaphrodite peep show at the tender age of 14. In Cal's adolescence, Eugenides returns to the type of longing that permeates ""Suicides."" It is longing that is more than wistful; it is compulsive and wrenching, doomed and indelible.
For Cal the object of such affection is a fellow classmate, a redheaded girl actually dubbed ""The Object."" The pursuit of The Object--Oh for Cal to have a place in her heart, her pants!--is the triumph of ""Middlesex."" At this point Cal is still Callie and possesses only the dimmest suspicions about her condition. One must relish the tension between two girls who are fearful of giving in to lesbian tendencies, while unwittingly engaged in heterosexual acts.
""Chekhov was right,"" Cal concludes--likening his/her body to a gun that must go off before the book's end. And this gun is the star of ""Middlesex,"" this build up between Callie's birth and the discovery of her condition. The attempts to fit in, to control sexual impulses, to win The Object's favor--here Eugenides authors a struggle which is more vivid than the historical tragedies faced by Cal's forefathers. The reader wonders what ""Middlesex"" could have been if Eugenides had squeezed the trigger earlier on.
