Middlesex

Rating:
Summary: A classic, the way a novel should be
Review: I don't write long reviews, so please don't take that for lack of enthusiasm for this book.

If you like the works of John Irving, you should love this book. Like JI, Eugenides writes about a unique individual and his/her seemingly epic, yet very American, life. Chocked full of great local and international history (Detroit & Greece) and relics of 20th century Americana, this is a perfectly constructed novel. The narration style, plot construction, and the dialogue are all done masterly. While reading this, I felt like Callie was sitting across from me telling me the story of her family and how he came to be the way he is. I didn't however, feel this was "magic realism" at all. The story to me seemed very realistic and was done with a very accurate description of the proper history in the background. Read this book, its awesome.

Rating:
Summary: An amazing, if uneven, story
Review: Jeffrey Eugenides is a treasure, no question. This book is obviously well researched, and the number of threads he is able to weave together is head-spinning. And perhaps therein lies my only trouble with this tale of transgender told in Homeric proportion: It is so good I wanted it to be better. The last 1/8 of the book needed more development imho, and I was ultimately disappointed. Having said that, I will still be first in line for whatever Eugenides comes up with next. Perhaps the further adventures of Cal Stephanides?

Rating:
Summary: What a novel should be; a darn good read.
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. What else is there to say? It was entertaining, insightful, and fun. Not a dull page, paragraph, or sentence in the lot. Each day while at work, I found myself looking forward to getting back into it. What more can you ask for in a work of fiction?

As to literary smoke and mirrors and overly crafted prose, I can only say; dude, chill out. Me thinks thou dost protest to much.

Is it art? Yes. Should it be regarded as a new member in the pantheon of Enduring Literature? Probably. It sure as heck attains that ranking in my home library.

Rating:
Summary: Amazing
Review: I am an avid reader. I suck it all in- fiction and non-fiction. This book exemplifies what I love about both genres. It is beautifully poetic and masterfully crafted prose, yet it is steeped in the reality of so many characters and situations- forbidden love and emigration, puberty in a post-pubescent Detroit, the blending of sexes and the clash of cultures.

Remember when you were young and thought you weren't normal? Your body was strange, you weren't sure if you had the right parts, the right feelings . . most of us wake up and out of that phase, if not gradually. Callie does everything she can to convince herself- without exposing her uncertainties- that she is normal. Yet in slight incidences, she knows she cannot be. What is amazing is how she transforms without hating herself, more than most of us can say who have faced fewer obstacles.

I recommend this book to all readers- epic lovers, historical fiction fans, scientists (along with "As Nature Made Him," a true story similar to Callie's, involving the famous sexologist John Money mimicked in this work by Dr. Luce), but especially to those who have ever felt out of place in her/his skin. This work beautifully illustrates that abnormality itself is the most natural state.

Rating:
Summary: Literary Fraud
Review: This novel is a literary fraud. It has the appearance of substance, of the monumental and revelatory, but this is mere pretense. The writer worked hard on this book, perhaps too hard. It's painful to see the brute craftsmanship in this novel, to see the smoke and mirrors, each ember agonizingly blown into a tiny and meaningless flame, each mirror strung at an awkward, dangerous angle. It has the appearance of art, but it is actually an engineering feat masquerading as architecture. All the surfaces are sanded, polished, painted, gleaming. We see the author selecting his trees, measuring, cutting them down (sometimes by pen knife), carrying enormous stumps, yes, he is sweating and bleeding. We hear the hammering. We count the nails. Something has been erected. But there is nothing inside. Face the fundamental flaw that cannot be camouflaged. The characters are caricatures. They aren't the stuff of myth. There is nothing rare about them. They are overly familiar. They are the staple of TV sit-coms. Central casting might have sent them. The alert reader winces. Not characters, but the illusion of characters. They don't have gestures, rather they have bits of business. This over-inflated novel, this bloated book, is an assemblage of mythic facades, like a Hollywood B-movie set. I was struck by the essential lack of intelligence emanating from the "characters" like a lethal poison that slowly sickens the reader. The "characters" engage in a mockery of dialogue. They exchange sthitck. This isn't even ethnic melodrama--it's sthick for all seasons. And it's relentless. The voices are repetitious and interchangeable. They are always at the same pitch, precisely. It becomes toneless. The post-post modernism is gimmicky. The reader sees the effort. Come on, fellow readers. This is literature, not woodshop. Even in our debased sub-literary global backwater, it is necessary that the writer receive some valid feedback. It's difficult to get a reality check, when everyone is either on the payroll or a hack. But listen closely. This book is a colossal mess. It's precious and self-conscious, overwrought and cloying. This novel is an embarrassment.

Rating:
Summary: Skip this and just read the exerpted story in the New Yorker
Review: I had liked the first novel, VIRGIN SUICIDES, and was more than usually entertained by the story in the New Yorker last month (exerpted from this novel of over 500 pages). I was dissappointed by 80% of the book. Not the writing which was all fine, but the subject matter which was several notches less interesting than the teenage hermaphroditic sexual awakening story that had been featured in the New Yorker story. There was a little more in the novel about the hermaphoditic life of the narrator but not enough to justify the price of a new hardback.

Rating:
Summary: On Middlesex Dr.
Review: Welcome to a new genre of book writing! This book has the power to open your eyes to a whole new perspective...It is one of those books you read to open your eyes to a whole new world and gain an understanding of some of the people that are around you. You really feel every emotion, every longing, and with every new revelation you feel a new revelation of yourself. An obviously researched book is a very good life lesson. I recommend this book for anyone who may have this condition or any other AIS related issue along with friends and family who would like to getting a deeper understanding of the feelings associated with conditions like this.

Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Book
Review: I only stumbled across Eugenides late last year. What a find. I read the "The Virgin Suicides," a pitch-perfect rendering of adolescent suffering from all the typical sexual and parental conflicts associated with that stage of life. Eugenides is one of those writers who, after reading only a few pages, you know you absolutely must read everything that he's written. Unfortunately, I looked around for more, and there was nothing to be found. Lucky for us, he's back with a big (in every way) book that shows just how hard he's been working since "The Virgin Suicides" and affirms just how good a writer he is.

It's always problematic to summarize the plot of a book built on ideas. Keeping that in mind, the book is narrated by Cal Stephanides, a man living in Germany as a member of the foreign service. Cal was raised as a girl (Callie) until he finds out during puberty that he's a pseudo-hermaphrodite, essentially a boy with a micropenis so small that it fooled his family and aging and sight-challenged family doctor into believing that he was a girl. More than half the book takes place before Cal is born, as Cal lays out the genetic lineage and family couplings that led to his genetic mutation. The book reaches back to Cal's grandparents and tells of their emigration to the United States and their early years there. It then tells the story of Cal's parents' courting and their attempts at assimilation so typical of the first generation born in the U.S. All of these plot twists prove fecund ground for Eugenides to explore topics of emigration, immigration, assimilation, race problems, and the class, ethnic and neighborhood demarcations that are so much a part of the American landscape.

The other half the book tells Callie's story, from her conception through her upbringing to her discovery at 14 that she is a he to the fallout from that discovery. Again, Eugenides uses this story to explore big issues like genetics (what he calls the modern version of predestination) versus upbringing, the importance of gender in America and the differences between the sexes. Again too, as in "The Virgin Suicides," he explores what it is to come of age, to discover the self, to find out, as have we all have, that there are parts of us that we do not like and would love to change, but that we must learn to accept to thrive. I would say that no one writing does teenage longing and suffering better than Eugenides. He does the suffering that attaches to teenage infatuation so well that at times you want to cry out yourself from the mix of agony and desire that his characters feel.

Anyway, with this book, I would say that Eugenides takes his place among other notable authors of his generation, including David Foster Wallace, Ricky Moody and Jonathan Franzen. In my opinion, he's better than Moody and Franzen, but not quite where DFW is. That said, those four authors are all quite different and perhaps would not even be compared except that they are acknowledged leading contemporary American writers of "serious" fiction. For comparison's sake, I would say that if you liked Moody's "The Ice Storm," you'll love this. I envy those of you who have yet to read this wonderful book. Enjoy it!

Rating:
Summary: Puts the tale back in genitalia
Review: (If my review title made you uncomfortable, you may want to skip this book. It's fundamentally very sweet natured, and with the exception of one chapter, pretty much useless as erotica, but it does get anatomically explicit before it's through. Genitalia do figure in this tale. 'Nuff said.)

In Jeffrey Eugenides' second book, we get two satisfying, and very different, short novels masquerading as one long one. Or, in keeping with its heroine's existence one precarious jump ahead of the freak show recruiters, you could think of this as Siamese twin novels, joined at the heart. Each fraternal (sororal?) twin is in its own way a sure-fire crowd pleaser, so even though I only rate the book at three and a half stars, I'm sure it will enjoy a long and comfortable ride on the best seller list. (The rating rounds up because I'm always grateful to get chapter titles, especially colorful ones. And as often as it forced me to wince in sympathy, it got me to laugh.)

In what may be a nod to Tristram Shandy, the book's main character, the believable, bright young hermaphrodite Calliope (eventually to be Cal) is introduced on the first page, and then doesn't get around to being born til nearly halfway through.

Calliope was the muse of epic poetry, and the pre-birth novel is the epic story of the Greek-American experience, as particularized in Callie's "yia yia", her silkworm spinning paternal grandmother Desdemona. The story of her escape from the Turkish torching of Smyrna, her very unorthodox marriage, her extended (and simultaneously telescoped) family in Detroit, her sex-divining spoon, and most deliciously of her adoption by a very American and very un-Greek religion - has the constant flavor of magical realism, without ever departing from strict plausibility. Eugenides' bemusement at and affection for all the chunks of Greekness that never quite melted down in the Melting Pot are evident throughout. We've seen this sort of ethnic homage often enough before, but he does it as well as any, and it's both touching and fun.

The post-birth novel has a completely different flavor. Hermaphroditism would seem like a natural magical-realist theme, playing off mythical archetypes as it does. But Callie is not going to lie down and play archetype for anyone. Cal is aware, certainly, of the echos and literary associations, and appreciates the irony of having landed the role of Teresias in her middle school production of Antigone. But he is also aware, as he recollects at 41 his normal American girlhood, and then leads us through the large agonies and small ecstasies of the minefield of his adolescence, that he has to come to grips with the ordinariness of his in-between condition, a condition that for all its relative rarity is shared in one form or another by millions of people. And even more than the obvious titillation value of the theme, it's this feet-on-the-ground, keenly reportorial nature of Cal's memoir, plus the way Callie's good nature and good humor gleam through the acute distress, that makes this second novel-within-the-novel as surefire a crowd pleaser as the first one.

Rating:
Summary: my big fat Greek Hermaphrodite
Review: Saying this book is about a hermaphrodite is a bit like saying "Moby Dick" is about a whale, but nevermind. A hard book to describe, but an easy book to fall in love with. Eugenides captures the reader from the very first page. This is a big, fat, sprawling epic, that takes the lucky reader on a journey from turn of the century Asia Minor to 1920s Detroit to post-communist Berlin, laughing all the way. This is one of those books where turning every page is bittersweet, you realize you are inevitably coming to the end. "Middlesex" shows us that the "Great American novel", much lambasted, much maligned, has perhaps had a sexual identity crisis here or there, but is very much alive and well.