Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
529 pages
Published 2002
Read from September 5 to September 13
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
On one level I'm amused by the similarities between Middlesex and the other recent Pulitzer-winning novel I've read, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Both are tragicomic, multi-generation epics of the immigrant experience, packed with literary allusions, often hilarious narration, and layered, repeating motifs. (In addition, both were written by balding men with goatees -- unremarkable in itself, perhaps, but part of a general paucity of female authors on the Pulitzer list.) I'll need to read more Pulitzer novels before I make any general indictment of the selection process, but I do think this reflects a fashion in modern novel-writing, a sort of high-level extension of the paint-by-numbers formula one may find in "how to write your first novel" guides. Not to denigrate the talents or (justified) esteem of Eugenides or Junot Díaz, but I wanted to make a broad, sweeping acknowledgment that something of a pattern is beginning to emerge, at least from my limited literary reading.
I must confess that the science fiction, fantasy, and comic book allusions of Díaz gave Oscar Wao something of an edge against Middlesex. And on some level I found myself discomfited by Eugenides' portrayal of gender, which, despite repeated assurances that gender is instilled while sex is biological, often feels more determinist and binary than I feel is correct. Buried under the well-meaning distinctions between sex and gender, I thought I kept picking up on a general through-line that genetics is destiny.
Perhaps this reflects the state of sex and gender understanding when Middlesex was written. Earlier, in fact, I had intended to open this review with the claim that Middlesex, despite its publication date, very much feels like a novel of the 1990s. Most pertinently, Middlesex is the story of a gene, a specific allele traced down through three generations of the tightly inbred Stephanides family. That conceit feels as '90s as Dolly the Sheep and Jurassic Park, GATTACA and the Human Genome Project. More flexible, less binary ideas of gender seemed to seep into society (or at least the leftmost sectors of the internet) over the course of the '00s; this talk of the all-important, overriding gene seems a bit of an anachronism now. Perhaps that's all I was sensing, and not some unconscious insistence upon rigid gender systems on the part of Eugenides.
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