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A review by pbraue13
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
2.0
“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…”
Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex came recommended to me for years—lovingly and insistently. That should have been a warning sign, given that the praise almost exclusively came from straight, white, cisgender readers who viewed the book as a masterpiece of identity and transformation. What I found instead was a sprawling, overlong novel with an unclear sense of focus or purpose, one that fumbles its most vital themes in favor of indulgent narrative detours and biological spectacle.
The book attempts to chart the generational saga of the Stephanides family, Greek immigrants who flee the fall of Smyrna and eventually settle in Detroit. In its early chapters, Middlesex is at its best, particularly in the rich, vivid depictions of historical moments—Smyrna’s fall to the Turks, the family’s transatlantic passage, and the early immigrant experience in America. These sections are imaginative, textured, and brimming with life.
But once the family lands in Detroit and the narrative shifts into a multi-generational domestic epic, the novel starts to falter. The family's ups and downs—its marriages, missteps, and cultural habits—are rendered with detail but little emotional weight. Rather than offering fresh insight into the immigrant experience, these segments feel like a stitched-together family scrapbook. The epic scope never congeals into a story with momentum or meaning; it drifts.
And then there’s Cal—or Calliope—the intersex protagonist whose journey is ostensibly the heart of the book. This, unfortunately, is where Middlesex falters most critically. What should be a profound exploration of gender identity and bodily autonomy instead becomes a narrative curiosity: a medical mystery with a side of Greek tragedy. Eugenides seems far more interested in describing Cal’s genitalia and genetic makeup than in developing Cal as a person, or seriously interrogating how society constructs and polices gender. What could have been a groundbreaking portrait of intersex experience ends up feeling like an experiment in exoticism, observed from a clinical distance.
There’s little introspection, and even less conflict. The novel fails to offer insight into how Cal navigates the world—not just biologically, but socially, politically, and emotionally—as someone outside the gender binary. Identity in Middlesex becomes more a narrative quirk than a lived reality. In that sense, it feels deeply of its time: a book fascinated by queerness but not engaged with it.
Further compounding the novel’s problems is its deeply clumsy treatment of race. Detroit’s history, brimming with racial tension, white flight, and economic upheaval, is touched upon but never truly grappled with. Black characters are relegated to the background or portrayed in flat, stereotypical ways, existing more as symbols of social decay than as human beings with their own stories.
Ultimately, Middlesex feels like two novels uneasily fused together—one, a vibrant historical fiction about Greek migration, and the other, a tepid bildungsroman about gender identity. Neither is fully realized. What could have been a powerful, genre-breaking exploration of the self turns into a family epic that forgets its center. Eugenides’ prose may be intelligent and often lyrical, but it masks a deep lack of empathy and understanding for the very subject he claims to illuminate.
This is not the queer classic it’s been sold as. It’s a book that watches from the outside—curious, clinical, and never quite brave enough to look deeper.
Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex came recommended to me for years—lovingly and insistently. That should have been a warning sign, given that the praise almost exclusively came from straight, white, cisgender readers who viewed the book as a masterpiece of identity and transformation. What I found instead was a sprawling, overlong novel with an unclear sense of focus or purpose, one that fumbles its most vital themes in favor of indulgent narrative detours and biological spectacle.
The book attempts to chart the generational saga of the Stephanides family, Greek immigrants who flee the fall of Smyrna and eventually settle in Detroit. In its early chapters, Middlesex is at its best, particularly in the rich, vivid depictions of historical moments—Smyrna’s fall to the Turks, the family’s transatlantic passage, and the early immigrant experience in America. These sections are imaginative, textured, and brimming with life.
But once the family lands in Detroit and the narrative shifts into a multi-generational domestic epic, the novel starts to falter. The family's ups and downs—its marriages, missteps, and cultural habits—are rendered with detail but little emotional weight. Rather than offering fresh insight into the immigrant experience, these segments feel like a stitched-together family scrapbook. The epic scope never congeals into a story with momentum or meaning; it drifts.
And then there’s Cal—or Calliope—the intersex protagonist whose journey is ostensibly the heart of the book. This, unfortunately, is where Middlesex falters most critically. What should be a profound exploration of gender identity and bodily autonomy instead becomes a narrative curiosity: a medical mystery with a side of Greek tragedy. Eugenides seems far more interested in describing Cal’s genitalia and genetic makeup than in developing Cal as a person, or seriously interrogating how society constructs and polices gender. What could have been a groundbreaking portrait of intersex experience ends up feeling like an experiment in exoticism, observed from a clinical distance.
There’s little introspection, and even less conflict. The novel fails to offer insight into how Cal navigates the world—not just biologically, but socially, politically, and emotionally—as someone outside the gender binary. Identity in Middlesex becomes more a narrative quirk than a lived reality. In that sense, it feels deeply of its time: a book fascinated by queerness but not engaged with it.
Further compounding the novel’s problems is its deeply clumsy treatment of race. Detroit’s history, brimming with racial tension, white flight, and economic upheaval, is touched upon but never truly grappled with. Black characters are relegated to the background or portrayed in flat, stereotypical ways, existing more as symbols of social decay than as human beings with their own stories.
Ultimately, Middlesex feels like two novels uneasily fused together—one, a vibrant historical fiction about Greek migration, and the other, a tepid bildungsroman about gender identity. Neither is fully realized. What could have been a powerful, genre-breaking exploration of the self turns into a family epic that forgets its center. Eugenides’ prose may be intelligent and often lyrical, but it masks a deep lack of empathy and understanding for the very subject he claims to illuminate.
This is not the queer classic it’s been sold as. It’s a book that watches from the outside—curious, clinical, and never quite brave enough to look deeper.