Long Distance Book Club: Middlesex

From Long Distance Book club reviews to travel stories to To-Do in 2014 updates, I have quite a bit of blogging to catch up on! 

April's Long Distance Book of the Month was Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. Middlesex is, on the surface, the story of a hermaphrodite: Calliope Helen Stephanides, who was born a girl in Detroit in 1960; "and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974."  The book in narrated by the adult "Cal," who works in the Foreign Service and is stationed in Berlin. To understand how Callie came to be Cal, the author takes the reader back in time to the village of Bithynios in present day Turkey that Callie's grandparents fled from during the Greco-Turkish War and the burning of the city of Smyrna. 

When I first began reading Middlesex, I assumed the plot would focus on the tension identified in the opening passage. We know from page 1 that Callie was born a girl, was raised as a girl, and is now a man. However, the book is about much more than gender identity and what it means to be a female, male, or "middle." It is, in many respects, an immigrant story with an unusual twist. The core of the novel doesn't center on Callie becoming Cal, but on the Greeks becoming Americans. It details the trials that face Cal's grandparents as they move to their new home in Detroit, Michigan. I can see Cal's grandmother's anxiousness about the "New World" in my own grandmother, who, though a first generation American, maintained a strong Ukrainian identity. I also enjoyed reading about Detroit during its golden years. As a child of the nineties, I often find it difficult to remember that Detroit used to be a wealthy, vibrant city. I felt that the author did a great job of weaving a fictional family's story into the true events of the 1967 Detroit race riot and white flight to the suburbs.

While I would definitely recommend reading Middlesex, I found the ending to be a bit unsatisfying. Without giving away too many spoilers, I feel that the author was over ambitious in the number of themes and events he incorporated into the plot. As I mentioned, in many respects, the core of the novel isn't even about Callie's change to Cal. And I think, in part because of this, the author misses his opportunity to show the reader that Callie is Cal. I found myself questioning if I would have bought this decision had the author not told us about Cal's decision from the first page. One could argue that perhaps the author is trying to illustrate the fluidity or unimportance of gender identity, but if that is the case, why does Callie feel a need to be Cal?

If only this were a non-Long Distance Book Club, and we could discuss this over wine... ;)