Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

My reading this year has seen a streak of Pulitzer Prize winners, having finished four in the past six weeks. Though I recognize that literary awards, like other awards, are often prone to biases toward the conventional, the politically correct, or the familiar, I have found the Pulitzers to be a convenient shortcut to notable literature over the last century. The list of winners includes such personal favorites as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, and James Agee's A Death in the Family. In the last decade, the award committee has shown particularly gifted taste with selections including Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies, Richard Russo's Empire Falls, and Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.

Among this most recent run of worthy titles, the award in 2003 went to Jeffrey Eugenides for his second novel, Middlesex. His debut, The Virgin Suicides (reviewed here), made some waves for its somewhat taboo subject matter and unusual first-person plural narration, and was adapted by Sofia Coppola for her feature-film debut. Nearly a decade later, he returned with a book that pushes even further into societal taboos. From the opening line, Calliope Stephanides makes clear he is not a run-of-the-mill narrator:

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 thus revealed up front that Calliope is an intersex individual, the single fact that drives the remaining 460-page narrative. Calliope, now Cal, is 41 years old and working in the U.S. Foreign Service in Berlin. That is the end of the story. The beginning of the story, as he tells it, takes us all the way back to 1922 and a widely-forgotten offshoot of World War I: the Greco-Turkish War. Calliope's grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty, are residents of a small village near Smyrna in western Anatolia, claimed by Greece as the spoils of war after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. And, by the way, they are brother and sister:

Joking but not joking, Desdemona and Lefty embraced. At first they just hugged in the standard way, but after ten seconds the hug began to change; certain positions of the hands and strokings of the fingers weren't the usual displays of sibling affection, and these things constitute a language of their own, announced a whole new message in the silent room.

When the tides turn and the Turks advance, Desdemona and Lefty flee to the shore with the rest of the new Greek refugees. As Smyrna burns and the flames advance, Lefty makes a desperate proposal: if we live, we marry. Desdemona, fully expecting to perish in short order, agrees. With little time remaining, Lefty makes use of his self-taught French to convince a wary French official to allow the two to be evacuated to Greece as French nationals. From there, the long boat ride to America gives them a much-needed opportunity to re-invent themselves and their back story:

On the eighth day at sea, Lefty Stephanides, grandly, on one knee, in full view of six hundred and sixty-three steerage passengers, proposed to Desdemona Aristos while she sat on a docking cleat. Young women held their breath. Married men nudged bachelors: "Pay attention and you'll learn something." My grandmother, displaying a theatrical flair akin to her hypochondria, registered complex emotions: surprise; initial delight; second thoughts; prudent near refusal; and then, to the applause already starting up, dizzy acceptance.

Once landed in America, the couple travels to Detroit where they convince their sponsor and cousin, Lina, to keep their secret. They share a residence with Lina and her husband, Jimmy Zizmo, and begin to build an American life. Lefty even does a brief stint on the assembly line with Ford:

Historical fact: people stopped being human in 1913. That was the year Henry Ford but his cars on rollers and made his workers adopt the speed of the assembly line. At first, workers rebelled. They quit in droves, unable to accustom their bodies to the new pace of the age. Since then, however, adaptation has been passed down: we've all inherited it to some degree, so that we plug right into joysticks and remotes, to repetitive motions of a hundred kinds.

But in 1922 it was still a new thing to be a machine.

Things do not go smoothly, however; Jimmy Zizmo becomes conspiratorial when the two women get pregnant simultaneously and appears to kill himself by plunging his car through thin ice on a frozen lake. Lefty and Desdemona grow apart, as she becomes fearful of reproducing after hearing the potential fate of inbred children. His basement speakeasy is hard-hit by the Great Depression, and Desdemona goes to work for the nascent Nation of Islam as a sericulturist:

Like a cleaning lady working in Grosse Point she came and went by the back door. Instead of a hat, she wore a head scarf to conceal her irresistible ears. She never spoke above a whisper. She never asked questions or complained. Having frown up in a country ruled by others, she found it all familiar. The fezzes, the prayer rugs, the crescent moons: it was a little like going home.

For the residents of Black Bottom it was like traveling to another planet. The temple's front doors, in a sweet reversal of most American entrances, let blacks in and kept whites out.

The lives of the next generation, married second-cousins Milton and Tessie, prove no less dramatic, with scenes featuring the 1967 Detroit race riot, in which Milton's business is burned (to his financial benefit via multiple fire insurance policies, the fate of Smyrna having been burned into his genes). And of course that brings us to their second child, Calliope. Largely presenting the outward appearance of a female child, with the family doctor failing to notice the unusual sex organs, she is raised without questions as a girl. It is only in puberty, when the other girls begin to blossom physically and menstruate, that anything seem amiss. Calliope falls in love with her best friend, referred to as "The Obscure Object" to protect her identity:

Her honey- or apricot-colored back tapered at the waist in a way mine didn't. There were white spots here and there, anti-freckles. Wherever I rubbed, her skin flushed. I was aware of the blood underneath, coursing and draining. Her underarms were rough like a cat's tongue. Below them the sides of her breasts swelled out, flattened against the mattress.

"Okay, I said, after a long while, "my turn."

But that night was like all the others. She was asleep.

It was never my turn with the Object.

Eugenides has somehow managed to craft a worthy addition to the canon of immigrant family sagas while also traversing the cultural taboos surrounding incest and intersexualism. While these topics certainly raise feelings of discomfort or awkwardness, they do not provoke the knee-jerk squeamishness that one might expect. Eugenides' is a sympathetic portrayal and brings the human elements to the forefront. The same holds for his forays into race relations, teen sexuality (also plumbed in The Virgin Suicides), and the immigrant experience. And though we know from the first page the exact point at which Calliope's sexual complexity will be discovered, four hundred pages later the moment is still suffused with tension and suspense. An extraordinary book.