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What it argues
Cal Stephanides is a middle-aged man living in Berlin who decides to tell the whole story — not just his own life, but the lives of his Greek immigrant grandparents and parents, all the way back to the incest that introduced a recessive gene into his bloodline and the gene that made Cal intersex. Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize-winning multigenerational epic that manages to be simultaneously a sweeping immigrant novel, a bildungsroman, and a meditation on how identity is made — by genetics, by culture, by the stories we inherit and the ones we choose to tell.
The novel's great achievement is that Eugenides makes the epic feel personal and the personal feel epic. Cal narrates with full omniscience, reaching back to describe scenes he wasn't present for — Greek villages, Detroit factory floors, 1970s California — and the bravado of this formal choice pays off. The immigrant sections (Desdemona and Lefty fleeing Smyrna in 1922, arriving in Detroit, settling in the community of Grosse Pointe) are genuinely moving. The Detroit sections track the city's rise through Ford's assembly lines and its fracture through the 1967 riots. The childhood sections in the 1970s follow a young person growing up understood as a girl but gradually aware of a difference that neither language nor culture yet gives her a name for.
What it gets right
- 1.
Identity is overdetermined — Middlesex argues that selfhood emerges from the intersection of genes, culture, place, and the stories we're told about ourselves, not from any single source.
- 2.
Cal's omniscient retrospective narration is itself a formal argument: to understand who you are, you have to understand where you came from, all the way back.
- 3.
The Detroit sections are some of the finest writing about the American industrial city and its racial fractures in contemporary fiction — the 1967 riots are rendered from multiple perspectives without simplifying anyone.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Jeffrey Eugenides is an American novelist born in Detroit in 1960. His debut, The Virgin Suicides (1993), was adapted into a celebrated film by Sofia Coppola. Middlesex (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the Ambassador Book Award, and was longlisted for the Booker Prize, selling millions of copies worldwide. His third novel, The Marriage Plot (2011), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Eugenides has taught at Princeton and is known for writing at extended intervals, with each novel operating on a formally distinct premise.
