There is something about novels you encounter, unexpectedly, in foreign places that makes them rise above the comfortable books you curl up with at home: the thrill of discovery, and then the delight of unanticipated pleasure as a stranger becomes an intimate friend.
One sleepless night in my friend’s dorm room in Geneva, I got out of bed and stubbed my toe on something hard. Hours later, when sleep still evaded me, I sent an exploratory hand under the bed and examined the cover. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, it said, and for a moment I thought it must be about London’s north-west hinterland, but the lush illustration under the title was of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus grasping each other beside a stream.
The book rested on my chest with a meaningful weight and its pages had already taken on the colour of an aged manuscript. From midnight to dawn it held me spellbound: monsters, surgeons, sieges, riots, silkworms and Cadillacs, life crammed into page after page. At its heart is a tale of those who don’t fit neatly anywhere: neither male nor female, American nor Greek, narrator Cal is pitched about by a world demanding conformity to narrow identities.
Middlesex begins in Bithynios – a village on the cusp of Europe and Asia – in 1922, with the story of Lefty and Desdemona, orphaned siblings who harvest silkworm cocoons and have sought comfort in each other’s arms from the violent tumult of those times. They become refugees and flee the Great Fire of Smyrna on passports they have managed to scam from the French consulate, heading to America and a new fate where “whatever he seemed to be would become what he was”.
Lefty and Desdemona settle in Detroit and have a child, Milton, who grows up to marry his cousin, Tessie. Their child, Calliope, swoops through the whole narrative, bearing witness to the Great Fire as well as his (her) parents’ courtship, until he (she) is eventually birthed and the social, emotional and genetic consequences of his ancestors’ misadventures play out in his body and his life. From the sheltered elysium of suburban America, Cal is flung into a world of headless medical photographs, freak shows, peepshows and jail cells – all the striving of his antecedents for prosperity and respectability undone by secrets and errant chromosomes.
Based on elements of Eugenides’s own biography, the book cross-fertilises his own story with that of Herculine Barbin, a 19th century intersex convent girl who committed suicide at the age of 30; Eugenides wanted to “write the story that I wasn’t getting from [Barbin’s] memoir”. Middlesex is indeed part-memoir and part-fiction, but it also strays from first person to third and puts Greek myth into the 20th century. Nothing seems to miss Eugenides’s omniscience – from camshafts on the Ford conveyor belt and compasses used for prayer in Nation of Islam temples, to the cry of “Opa, motherfucker” from the lips of a rioter as he throws a Molotov cocktail at a Greek-owned bar in 1967.
It’s the kind of novel that gets your blood racing and makes sleep impossible. I read its 528 pages in one sitting, and spent the next few days talking about it, pestering my poor friend, Lana – whose book it was – about the small details that burst like flares in my memory. Do you remember that bit where Desdemona opened a cocoonery with the Fruit of Islam? What about when Cal goes on his first date with Julie? It was full of the kind of discoveries and perception that you expect from a great novel.
A particular pleasure came from the exploration of Cal’s medical condition, specifically the education it gave me on 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, and how this genetic condition – which affects male sexual development – can lie dormant, waiting to wreak havoc on an individual. On Cal’s first visit to Dr Luce’s office, you can smell the latex and bleach and feel the lick of his gaze as he prods and scribbles, prods and scribbles.
The cause, frequency, variety and effect of intersex conditions constitute a fascinating subject, and experiencing it from Cal’s perspective – where each diagnosis and prognosis is like a mortar demolishing the future he saw for himself – is heartbreaking. Whether we are chauvinists or feminists, we take it for granted that society is made of two sexes, female and male, and we generally purge those who don’t fit into this mould, banishing them to the fringes. Even the discussion of intersex individuals is taboo in many cultures, and Middlesex examines what it means to leave normality behind and to become, without volition or warning, a living taboo.
I sometimes joke that every novel should be written just like Middlesex, but it is one of those works that never fails to impress me. It is extravagant, clever, open-minded and ever so slightly melodramatic. It took Eugenides a decade to complete, and its entwining intricacy is a sign of a book that was allowed to mature into fruition.
Middlesex gives me the courage to take risks in my own writing and to bite off more than I think I can chew. It also reminds me that there is much we don’t know about each other’s lives, however banal they may seem.
