'Middlesex' explores gender

Author: Virginia Lawton Harper

"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 August of 1974."

It is with these confusingly contradictory words that Jeffrey Eugenides begins his second novel, "Middlesex," an epic that follows three generations of a Greek family from a small Turkish town to their establishment in Detroit's Greek community. In the midst of a century of gossip-worthy history, Cal, our narrator stands alone, a 41-year-old man in the Foreign Service office in Germany. Only he is qualified to tell the story for one very apparent reason - born physically a girl, and hormonally a boy, his life story is the climax to a tale about his family's history. Beginning with Cal's grandparents in the "old country," the story follows the immigrants' struggle in their new country and their children's rise in stature thanks to a lucrative chain of cheap hot dog stands in Detroit -- a ready symbol of realized opportunity for economic and social renewal in the United States.

Eugenides uses "Middlesex" to question gender roles in a traditional family structure and to emphasize the fluidity of gender. Cal, then, is the perfect narrator because he has lived as several different versions of his self - a young girl clad in frilly dresses, an adolescent woman questioning her sexuality and her attraction to her female friends, a runaway boy who tries to escape America's strict gender definitions and a single man, working in Europe as he hides from reality. Yet despite Cal's male hormonal makeup, his masculine physique and his desire to be a heterosexual man, one obstacle remains -- he lacks male reproductive organs, including a penis. The manuscript that Cal writes, the words of "Middlesex," is for him a way to come to terms with his family, his past and his sexuality. In the text, he confronts a life that he has escaped for years by continuously running from it. In writing, he comes to understand himself, molding his history in order to form a phallus that for the first time in his life gives him a clear sense of his own gender, one that he establishes as neither masculine nor feminine.

Cal's story coherently skips between a chronological narrative, the memoirs of a family displaced by war and his own present life in Berlin. The most striking feature of "Middlesex" is the atmosphere that the family creates - calm, quiet and homey - in the midst of continual upheaval. Eugenides masterfully weaves an innate peace into the story of the Stephanides' family even in the midst of incest, dark secrets, mafia affiliations, race riots, gory murders and endless sex. While these stresses at times create unrest and anxiety for the novel's characters, they never wreak havoc on the family as a whole, a testament to the strength and solidarity that unconditional love brings to relationships.

Eugenides successfully fuses the epic tone of Homer with a suggestion of mysticism, reminiscent of the work of Gabriel García Marquez. Cal's grandmother, Desdemona, works into the narrative as his connection to the family's vague and numinous past. Arriving at Ellis Island in 1922, Desdemona finds herself required by inspectors to cut her long braids of hair into a stylish bob in order to facilitate integration into American culture. Horrified, she pledges never to cut it again, a promise that she keeps. As "Middlesex" unwinds, so too does Desdemona's hair, and as she grows older and more senile, it takes on a life of its own that mystically speaks to Cal of the family's past - a long yarn that he eventually finds he must unwind to discover himself.

"Middlesex" was published in 2002 by Picador and received the Pulitzer Prize.