Published 2002 / Length 529 pages
‘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, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.’
So begins Middlesex, a lush, engaging and epic story that follows the Stephanides family from war-torn Asia Minor in 1922, through Detroit during the sixties race riots, to present-day Berlin. Narrated by hermaphrodite teenager Cal (previously Calliope), a third-generation Stephanides, it covers many events that define the twentieth century – Prohibition, immigration, race clashes, the Nation of Islam – but always comes back to the twists and turns of daily life. A truly multicultural novel, the book attempts to deal with the melting pot of modern life; how past and present are entwined with the family’s joint American and Greek heritage. The Stephanideses’ changing fortunes throughout the century echo America’s evolving sense of self, while Cal’s adolescent uncertainties come to symbolize much more: the nature of identity, whether personal or national.
‘[An] uproarious epic, at once funny and sad … Mr Eugenides has a keen sociological eye for twentieth-century American life … But it’s his emotional wisdom, his nuanced insight into his characters’ inner lives, that lends this book its cumulative power.’ – The New York Times
• The novel frequently skips between time periods, and withholds information. Is Cal/Calliope a reliable narrator? How can he/she know so much about the past?
• Discuss the clash in the novel between traditional storytelling techniques and Cal/Calliope’s moments of postmodernism.
• Mount Olympus is the original home of the principal gods of the Greek pantheon. What roles do fate and classical mythology play in the novel? Does Middlesex suggest that some things are destined to occur?
• Middlesex won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and was selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2007.
• The novel is only Eugenides’s second book, after The Virgin Suicides, which was made into a film in 1999 starring Kirsten Dunst.
• Middlesex took almost ten years to write, and was originally planned as a much shorter piece.
• The Stephanideses’ heritage is informed by the author’s own background; the Eugenideses are also Greeks from Asia Minor.
• Geek Love by KATHERINE DUNN – a family with varying genetic anomalies have to cope with daily life after their circus disbands.
• Nights at the Circus by ANGELA CARTER – stars half-bird, half-woman, Fevvers, and is set in London and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century.
• The Corrections by JONATHAN FRANZEN (see here) – another epic novel that asks how much our identity is defined by our family.
• Orlando by VIRGINIA WOOLF – another ‘hermaphrodite’ narrator takes charge in this playful and experimental novel.