Scan barcode
A review by mafiabadgers
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.0
First read 02/2025 for Farnham book club
I was thinking a lot about the American inter-generational epic novel as I read Middlesex. It always seems to do well with (American) critics, but I don't particularly care for it (at least, I certainly wasn't in the mood for one when my book club selected Middlesex). It occupies an outsize place on the American literary landscape, and I think the reason for this, as succinctly as I can put it, is that American history is settler history.
The history of England begins in the Dark Ages. Never mind that England, as a geo-political entity, didn't exist. Never mind that we had the Stone Age and the Romans. Never mind that the historians say otherwise. I'm talking about English history as it exists in the minds of the wider population. This is a model of history that divides it up into periods of interest, and gives roughly equal weighting to the Egyptians and the [Golden Age of] pirates. This is a model of history in which each period has a corresponding glut of historical fiction (and usually a related fantasy subgenre, to boot). The Dark Ages rumble along until we hit the Shakespeare times (not the Renaissance, which is European), and then jump to the Industrial Revolution, by which we really mean the Victorian period, a time when Sherlock Holmes chased Jack the Ripper down smog-shrouded streets lined with Dickensian orphans. This is also the Age of Empire, and usually what people are referring to when they talk about 'the olden days' (though this can also refer to the mediaeval period). Somewhere in the middle is the Regency period, which, thanks to the efforts of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, is about people falling in love in fancy houses. The Napoleonic Wars barely register on the English psyche. World War One gets overlooked in favour of an obsession with World War Two (when Churchill and British Pluck saved the world from evil Nazis), and that brings us to the present day. What does America have that can compare with that?
Well, there's the Wild West. And perhaps the Racism Times, the Antebellum South and the Civil War. But that's it, really. They try to compensate for it by coming up with snazzy names like the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Swinging Sixties, but they're all pretty paltry in comparison to sweeping mediaeval centuries. I will grant that the Cold War was notable, but the spy thriller subgenre it spawned is the property of a Mr James Bond, of Her Majesty's Secret Service.
And the reason Americans conceive of their history in this way is very neatly bounded up in the concept of the Wild West. It's a genre about taming and claiming a wild land. What it most decidedly is not is a genre about murder and land loss—effectively, an invasion. If American history was a history of the land, then Americans would have to admit that the settlement of America is only the most recent phase in a long, distinguished history. It would chip away at the fragile legitimacy of the United States as a geo-political entity. It would reframe that vaunted colonisation as an invasion. In order to avoid this, America must therefore be conceived of in the broader cultural psyche as a young nation, as an offshoot of Europe, as the natural result of a Manifest Destiny. This, however, leads to a certain insecurity. Where was America's Shakespeare, their Goethe, their Cervantes? For many years, America was seen as a culturally underdeveloped country, unable to compete with the European heavyweights. Nathaniel Hawthorne brought about a new era, and as I understand it, is still taught in American schools today as the 'first American man of letters', passing on that youthful insecurity to a new generation. It makes itself manifest in other ways, too: Renaissance Fairs, the celebration of the history of another continent, and the bizarre American tendency to name sons after their fathers and call them 'the Second'. (Note that this is never done with the daughters. The patronym must be preserved.) It's popular to say of old money families that their ancestors 'came over on the Mayflower'. Meanwhile, the English upper crust can usually trace their roots back to the sixtenth century.
And so it is in this context that I see the inter-generational American epic as a repeated attempt to shore up a flimsy historical myth. Add onto that the angle of the 'immigrant epic', and I start to understand Middlesex's desire not just to reaffirm USAmerican history, but to write these Greek immigrants into it. Eleutherios 'Lefty' Stephanides works for a spell at Henry Ford's factory, then becomes a Prohibition-era rum-runner. His son, Milton, joins the US Navy during WWII, and plays a small role in the 1967 Detroit race riots, while his grandson grows his hair long and drops acid to Beatles jams. If the Stephanides had only arrived a few years earlier, they would have been written as cowboys and gold rushers. The original immigrants try to cling to their culture; younger generations assimilate more than the elders; sons turn against their fathers; as far as the family is concerned, all the usual clichés structure the over-arching plot. It's not badly done by any means. I just didn't particularly want to read it.
Of course, in addition to being an inter-generation American epic and an immigrant epic, it's also an intersex story. This was the part of the book I found by far the most interesting, and the bit that kept me reading past the sprawling, incestual tale of migration and assimilation. Frankly, I would have been happy if the first half of the book had been cut entirely, and even happier if Cal's life story had gone on even longer. The book mentions Herculine Barbin (p. 19), and I think I spotted an allusion on p. 293, as Cal tells of the cottage in which his all-girls school's female founders had lived: "[fifth graders] filed by the two single bedrooms (which fooled them maybe)". Callie's relationship and sexual escapades with the Obscure Object may well have been modelled directly on Barbin's story.
At several points in the book, most notably with his casting in a school play, Cal is identified with the mythological figure Tiresias, whom the gods turned from a man to a woman and back again. One moment of the Tiresias myth is conspicuously absent: when trying to settle an argument about whether men or women have more fun in the bedroom, Zeus and Hera ask him for the answer. On the basis of his transitions, Tiresias is positioned as a site of knowledge, unavailable to others, that can nonetheless be disclosed to satisfy cisgender/perisex curiosity. While transgender characters have only in recent years begun to proliferate in fiction, the transgender memoir has been a thriving nonfiction subgenre for years. It is perhaps able to accept transgender/intersex people as fascinating oddities than as significant people in their own right. This, I think, is why the book finds it necessary to use first-person narration; third-person would be too voyeuristic. First-person is necessary in order to create a sense of disclosure, an illusion of consent to the telling of this story, because Eugenides feels that this way he can still get into all the juicy genital details without coming across as pornographic or lecherous.
Naturally, this creates an enormous problem, because Cal wasn't even alive for most of the time depicted in the book, and couldn't possibly have learned all the details he narrated. This results in an intriguingly self-conscious sense of the manufactured:
I was thinking a lot about the American inter-generational epic novel as I read Middlesex. It always seems to do well with (American) critics, but I don't particularly care for it (at least, I certainly wasn't in the mood for one when my book club selected Middlesex). It occupies an outsize place on the American literary landscape, and I think the reason for this, as succinctly as I can put it, is that American history is settler history.
The history of England begins in the Dark Ages. Never mind that England, as a geo-political entity, didn't exist. Never mind that we had the Stone Age and the Romans. Never mind that the historians say otherwise. I'm talking about English history as it exists in the minds of the wider population. This is a model of history that divides it up into periods of interest, and gives roughly equal weighting to the Egyptians and the [Golden Age of] pirates. This is a model of history in which each period has a corresponding glut of historical fiction (and usually a related fantasy subgenre, to boot). The Dark Ages rumble along until we hit the Shakespeare times (not the Renaissance, which is European), and then jump to the Industrial Revolution, by which we really mean the Victorian period, a time when Sherlock Holmes chased Jack the Ripper down smog-shrouded streets lined with Dickensian orphans. This is also the Age of Empire, and usually what people are referring to when they talk about 'the olden days' (though this can also refer to the mediaeval period). Somewhere in the middle is the Regency period, which, thanks to the efforts of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer, is about people falling in love in fancy houses. The Napoleonic Wars barely register on the English psyche. World War One gets overlooked in favour of an obsession with World War Two (when Churchill and British Pluck saved the world from evil Nazis), and that brings us to the present day. What does America have that can compare with that?
Well, there's the Wild West. And perhaps the Racism Times, the Antebellum South and the Civil War. But that's it, really. They try to compensate for it by coming up with snazzy names like the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and the Swinging Sixties, but they're all pretty paltry in comparison to sweeping mediaeval centuries. I will grant that the Cold War was notable, but the spy thriller subgenre it spawned is the property of a Mr James Bond, of Her Majesty's Secret Service.
And the reason Americans conceive of their history in this way is very neatly bounded up in the concept of the Wild West. It's a genre about taming and claiming a wild land. What it most decidedly is not is a genre about murder and land loss—effectively, an invasion. If American history was a history of the land, then Americans would have to admit that the settlement of America is only the most recent phase in a long, distinguished history. It would chip away at the fragile legitimacy of the United States as a geo-political entity. It would reframe that vaunted colonisation as an invasion. In order to avoid this, America must therefore be conceived of in the broader cultural psyche as a young nation, as an offshoot of Europe, as the natural result of a Manifest Destiny. This, however, leads to a certain insecurity. Where was America's Shakespeare, their Goethe, their Cervantes? For many years, America was seen as a culturally underdeveloped country, unable to compete with the European heavyweights. Nathaniel Hawthorne brought about a new era, and as I understand it, is still taught in American schools today as the 'first American man of letters', passing on that youthful insecurity to a new generation. It makes itself manifest in other ways, too: Renaissance Fairs, the celebration of the history of another continent, and the bizarre American tendency to name sons after their fathers and call them 'the Second'. (Note that this is never done with the daughters. The patronym must be preserved.) It's popular to say of old money families that their ancestors 'came over on the Mayflower'. Meanwhile, the English upper crust can usually trace their roots back to the sixtenth century.
And so it is in this context that I see the inter-generational American epic as a repeated attempt to shore up a flimsy historical myth. Add onto that the angle of the 'immigrant epic', and I start to understand Middlesex's desire not just to reaffirm USAmerican history, but to write these Greek immigrants into it. Eleutherios 'Lefty' Stephanides works for a spell at Henry Ford's factory, then becomes a Prohibition-era rum-runner. His son, Milton, joins the US Navy during WWII, and plays a small role in the 1967 Detroit race riots, while his grandson grows his hair long and drops acid to Beatles jams. If the Stephanides had only arrived a few years earlier, they would have been written as cowboys and gold rushers. The original immigrants try to cling to their culture; younger generations assimilate more than the elders; sons turn against their fathers; as far as the family is concerned, all the usual clichés structure the over-arching plot. It's not badly done by any means. I just didn't particularly want to read it.
Of course, in addition to being an inter-generation American epic and an immigrant epic, it's also an intersex story. This was the part of the book I found by far the most interesting, and the bit that kept me reading past the sprawling, incestual tale of migration and assimilation. Frankly, I would have been happy if the first half of the book had been cut entirely, and even happier if Cal's life story had gone on even longer. The book mentions Herculine Barbin (p. 19), and I think I spotted an allusion on p. 293, as Cal tells of the cottage in which his all-girls school's female founders had lived: "[fifth graders] filed by the two single bedrooms (which fooled them maybe)". Callie's relationship and sexual escapades with the Obscure Object may well have been modelled directly on Barbin's story.
At several points in the book, most notably with his casting in a school play, Cal is identified with the mythological figure Tiresias, whom the gods turned from a man to a woman and back again. One moment of the Tiresias myth is conspicuously absent: when trying to settle an argument about whether men or women have more fun in the bedroom, Zeus and Hera ask him for the answer. On the basis of his transitions, Tiresias is positioned as a site of knowledge, unavailable to others, that can nonetheless be disclosed to satisfy cisgender/perisex curiosity. While transgender characters have only in recent years begun to proliferate in fiction, the transgender memoir has been a thriving nonfiction subgenre for years. It is perhaps able to accept transgender/intersex people as fascinating oddities than as significant people in their own right. This, I think, is why the book finds it necessary to use first-person narration; third-person would be too voyeuristic. First-person is necessary in order to create a sense of disclosure, an illusion of consent to the telling of this story, because Eugenides feels that this way he can still get into all the juicy genital details without coming across as pornographic or lecherous.
Naturally, this creates an enormous problem, because Cal wasn't even alive for most of the time depicted in the book, and couldn't possibly have learned all the details he narrated. This results in an intriguingly self-conscious sense of the manufactured:
It's foggy out, and late—just past 3 a.m. To be honest, the amusement grounds should be closed at this hour, but, for my own purposes, tonight Electric Park is open all night, and the fog suddenly lifts, all so that my grandfather can look out the window and see a roller coaster streaking down the track. A moment of cheap symbolism only, and then I have to bow to the strict rules of realism, which is to say: they can't see a thing. [pp. 110-111]
It's very well handled. There's a delightfully playful postmodernist sensibility to it, that even as the book claims to "bow to the strict rules of realism", it tacitly admits that this cannot ever be a realist novel. "Of course, a narrator in my position (prefetal at the time) can't be entirely sure about any of this." (p. 9) There is no pretence of plausibility here. It looks the reader dead in the eye and asks, belligerently, 'what are you going to do about it?' I would have liked to see Cal adopt that sort of attitude himself, but then, radical self-confidence doesn't win Pulitzers. Insecure, introspective, inter-generation American epics do. So maybe I can't be annoyed at it. It's not entirely fair to dislike a Pulitzer-winning novel for being the sort of novel to win a Pulitzer. I would have happily given it three or four stars, if it weren't for the fact that I didn't like it. Perhaps by the same metric, you shouldn't expect an inter-generation American epic novel hater to like one of said novels simply because it's good.