Middlesex

Middlesex
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides 2002 529 pp
My rating: 3*
Started October 27 2008, Finished November 4 2008.

This book could have been a lot better if it had had more rigorous editing. Problem areas include both plot and style. Eugenides often digresses from his story, the hermaphrodite narrator’s, Callie, coming to terms with his/her gender, to provide a poorly integrated history of the city of Detroit through much of the 20th century. Equally bothersome is the frequently joking tone he uses which clashes with Callie’s often poignant identity struggles. The attempt to mix comedy and tragedy is unsuccessfully Garp-like, while the attempt to weave an urban history into the story seems a clumsy attempt to emulate what Roth did so well in American Pastoral. Another big problem is the gap in Callie’s story: the book consists primarily of a detailed first hand account of the Callie’s first 16 years interleaved with observations from the middle aged, gender-determined Callie. While the youthful Callie is a believable, often compelling creation, the middle age Callie is rarely either and, worse, not a fully plausible grown up Callie.

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Chapter One is simultaneously jokey and portentous, an uncomfortable and discordant combination.

Book seems overstuffed and extroverted

Too digressive: The depression chapter has asides about the development of photography, smut of the era and Fard Muhamad, the founder of the Nation of Islam, turns out to be Jimmy Kizma, Callie’s grandfather, thought to have died in a bootlegging, a revelation which is utterly preposterous and irrelevant to the plot.

On P 169 the Willow Run automobile plant is said to have produced “B-52s” during WWII. The B-52 was not developed until after the Korean War.

Middlesex is in part of eulogy for the Detroit of the middle of the 20th Century, in the same way that American Pastoral is for the Newark of the same era; this element of the book seems forced and awkward, unlike in Roth’s book where it seamlessly seems part of the narrator’s consciousness. The plot is often contrived in order to reveal some detail of Detroit’s history e.g. the riots and the house in Grosse Point.

The scene of seven year old Callie following tanks on her bike across town into intense gunfire during the riots is beyond preposterous.

Chapter Eleven’s return from college is stock, clichéd 70’s era rebellion.

The death of one of Callie’s schoolmates during a school play is a pointless bit of melodrama.

The later third of the book, which concentrates on Callie’s teenage years and the discovery of her hermaphroditism, improves considerably. The in the cabin in the chapter “Flesh and Blood” is very effective.

P442 - More lack of editorial thoroughness: watching a football game on TV ona Wednesday AM.

Omniscient first-person narrator doesn't really work -- knows too much about what others are thinking

Too much of a gulf between the Callie we last seen at age 15 and the adult telling the story at age 40 -- what happened in between. In fact the entire adult thread is halfhearted and unconvincing.

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Mother’s bras are “fire retardant” (6)

“The only way we know it’s true is that we both dreamed it. That’s what reality is. It’s a dream everyone has together.” (343)

German wasn’t good for conversations because you had to wait to the end of the sentence for the verb, and so couldn’t interrupt. (7)