Cal Stephanides, narrator of Middlesex, tells the story of the past three generations of his family. He begins with his grandparents' incestuous escape from war-torn Asia Minor, through his parents' all-American courtship, and then through his own childhood. Cal was born Calliope Helen Stephanides, believed by everyone to be a girl until adolescence began to reveal the truth. Cal intersperses the epic of his family's story with updates on his adult life working for the embassy in Berlin, commenting on the world's view of him, and meeting someone to whom he finally might be able to tell his secret.
There are also plenty of great symbols, themes, metaphors, similes, motifs, parallels, and other such literary devices that I dutifully marked throughout my reading. I particularly love characters' hair as a symbol of their personalities, the contrast, evolution, and supplanting of Greekness and/with Americanness, and the parallels between members of different generations. I'm afraid that I may have ignored many other parallels and doublings and dualities simply because I was still doubled-out after reading A Tale of Two Cities and truly couldn't believe that any book could dare to come my way and have yet more doubles as literary devices. The "air-ride" symbol is so cool when it's first used, and then it's absolutely chilling and tragic when Eugenides revives it near the end. Of course, genes, genetics, heredity, and evolution all play important roles in the plot and in the writing.
The plot of Middlesex is fine. It's really three story arcs, each one leading to the final tale of Cal himself. I wish that the two preceding stories had built accordingly; I found the Tessie/Milton segment to be neither as interesting nor as memorable as the Desdemona/Lefty segment. Maybe it's just because I truly dislike Milton.
Yes, Milton, that all-American capitalist, racist, anti-feminist, and homophobe. Gotta love him. Although Cal's portrayal of his father is complicated and loving as expected, I still found myself unable to like Milton. All the other members of the Stephanides family I could get behind, despite none of them being the best people. I have a particular soft spot for Sourmelina who, despite being quite problematic in her own right, is an outlandish lesbian ("'one of those women they named the island after,'" Cal's aunt says, which I found quite amusing and--true to form--Greek (86)) and I wish she hadn't faded from the story as she did. The generational parallels that Eugenides establishes throughout the book serve to highlight the most interesting features of every main character in the Stephanides family both as just characters and also as parts of a story and a work of literature. In the interest of not giving away major plot points, I will only say that the survival of certain people and the continually diverging paths of couples are particularly interesting results that I am looking forward to hopefully discussing. The Obscure Object (whose identity I will leave unexplained, as feels appropriate--also I just want to avoid spoiling anything) is a really interesting character. I'm still considering her and all her implications, and I hope that I have either a friend or classmate who also read Middlesex with whom I can discuss the book and particularly the Object. I really felt for poor Cal during that whole bit of his life.
A final part that I really, really loved: There is an absolutely brilliant paragraph that's on page 431 of my paperback copy that surrounds a dictionary and some definitions and the judgment of society and culture. It's so true and so YES; it's a hard punch and a satisfying one, too. It's so wonderful (and also a bit spoilery) that I will leave it to you to get to when you read Middlesex.
Now let's talk about how Middlesex, as a book about an intersex person, has aged, and allow me to ask some questions that came to mind while I was reading.
First, I'd like to make it very clear that, although Middlesex consistently uses the word "hermaphrodite" to describe Cal and other intersex people, the word is considered a slur by most intersex people and should never be used to refer to the community as a whole, and should only be used for specific people if they have asked to be referred to as such. "Intersex," which is used occasionally in Middlesex, is the generally acceptable alternative. As far as terminology is concerned, Middlesex looks thoroughly outdated as a book with an intersex main character.
My knowledge of intersex conditions and people isn't particularly expansive. But I do know a good deal more about transgender people (disclaimer: I'm not trans, I've just done as much as I can to get educated on the subject), and Middlesex doesn't measure up in its handling of transness and adjacent areas, either.
First, Cal never refers to himself as transgender, although he certainly fits the definition: someone whose gender does not match the one they were assigned at birth. Of course, if an individual fits this definition, it is still their choice whether or not they want to refer to themselves or be referred to as trans, but the vast majority of binary (and I'll get to this later) trans people do claim that label. If Eugenides is going to create a trans character and then never call him trans, he'd better let that character do some explaining (not that anyone has to justify their use or lack of use of certain labels, but an explanation would make sense with Cal's character and way of telling his story). But there is nary an explanation to be found. There's a trans woman near the end of the book, and that's the only time that anyone is ever described as such. It doesn't make sense. Maybe my viewing Cal as trans is a product of very recent definitions and ideas; maybe in 2002, a real Cal would not have even seen himself as trans. But again, this means that Middlesex has not aged too well.
Of course, it is possible that Cal's gender actually changes. Gender is a diverse and wildly varying thing. Maybe Cal does initially develop as a girl, and then as a teenager becomes a boy (and I am talking about gender, not sex, which are two different things; Eugenides seems to understand that at least). But Eugenides could have made that clearer. And especially if Cal's gender didn't change and he was always a boy, I want to make it clear that using a trans person's birth name (also called their "dead name") isn't okay. For Cal to call his younger self "Callie" and "Calliope" does work for the story. But I still cringed at it a bit.
Third, let's talk about the gender binary! I implied previously that Cal is a binary trans man. (Quick background: Our society sets up gender as a binary. There are two categories: men/boys and women/girls. In this paradigm, people are either one or the other, not both, not neither. But gender is more accurately modeled as a spectrum. Generally men/boys go on one end and women/girls on the other. Gender can also have varying levels of intensity; agender people are those who do not have a gender at all. People whose gender falls somewhere on the spectrum that does not also fit into the binary model of gender tend to use the label nonbinary. It's all very mushy and no one really has it figured out. But this background will serve our purposes from here on out.) But I found a few hints that Cal might be nonbinary. There's this one line that I read and got very excited about because it practically proved the suspicion that I'd felt for a while. I can't find it now (frustratingly), but it was something about how Cal never feels like he completely belongs to the world of men or the world of women. "NONBINARY!!" I screamed silently. Of course, this is all just speculation. I just think it would be cool if Cal had been deliberately written as nonbinary. But Eugenides struggled to write about experiences already so different from his own that such a task might have been better left to someone else.
Middlesex's final sign of age in the gender department is gender expression. I was driven insane by constant implications that Cal's gender expression reveals perfectly correlating aspects of his gender. Gender and gender expression are two different things, Eugenides. I know girls who dress like Cal, move like Cal, talk like Cal, throw their erasers in the air like Cal, interrupt people like Cal--that doesn't make them anything other than girls (and actually, being eager to engage in debates with your classmates isn't a masculine characteristic as Eugenides implies at one point--I can say from personal experience that girls tend to gain confidence in the classroom when attending an all-girls school as Cal does, and that can express itself in some of the same ways that Eugenides proposes as evidence for Cal's real gender). I sometimes recognized myself in Cal. Eugenides is nearly as bad as the questionable Dr. Luce when it comes to gender expression. Take every bit of "evidence" that Eugenides offers us that Cal is a boy and apply it to a girl. The only conclusion that you'd reach is that that girl is masculine. I'm not at all saying that Cal is not a guy. He knows he is, and as readers we are inside his head and privy to that deep knowledge of himself. But masculinity does not necessarily imply maleness.
That ended up being long, but hopefully anyone who reads my review and then reads Middlesex will go into it armed against any confusion that it might cause readers regarding intersex people, transgender people, gender, sex, and gender expression.
In short, I would recommend Middlesex to anyone who wants a fantastic story that is expertly-written and many-layered. Just educate yourself before, during, and/or after.
Correction, 10/8/17: An earlier version of this review stated that some intersex people prefer to be described with the term "disorder of sex development (DSD)." Although there are indeed a small number of people who feel that way, the majority of intersex people actually dislike this term as it pathologizes their identity. It is generally safest to go with "intersex" unless the person in question specifically requests that you refer to them otherwise. As always, language is imprecise and no one agrees. Just be considerate and don't get too attached.