Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

This is Cal Stephanides, grandson to Greek immigrants, all-American boy, 41. Cal is living in Berlin, working as an assistant cultural attache. Cal spent the first 14 years of his life as Calliope, granddaughter to Greek immigrants, all-American girl. An accident at 14 put Calliope in the ER where an examination led to long-delayed discoveries, which led to second opinions, which led to New York and a specialist who finally revealed what Calliope had long-suspected but couldn’t prove. Calliope was not a girl, but a boy with unformed genitals, a victim of 5-Alpha Reductase Deficiency Syndrome. A hidden genetic flaw, one of the few things her grandparents were allowed to bring to America when they fled Smyrna in 1922, has caused a mutation on her 5th chromosome, causing Calliope to be born a hermaphrodite. However the physician in attendance at her birth--another Greek immigrant who accompanied Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides to America--was old, distracted, and most likely not well-schooled in hermaphrodites. So, for the first 14 years of her life, Cal was Calliope.

MIDDLESEX is probably not a book I would have picked up on my own. Whether because the “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize” label on the cover shouts BORING to me, or because the idea of reading the life and times of three generations of Greek immigrants also shouts BORING to me, if not for MIDDLESEX having been recommended, I would not have chosen this book on my own. And this is why sometimes you have to step outside your comfort zone and read something that sounds like it’s the complete opposite of anything you’d ever read. MIDDLESEX is one of the best books I’ve ever read.

Author Jeffrey Eugenides (THE VIRGIN SUICIDES) is brilliant, plain and simple. In a perfect world, where every writer honestly strives to be the best they can, not just adequate or publishable, but a master of their craft, Jeffrey Eugenides is the standard by which writers would measure themselves. That’s not to say he’s the best writer in the world--I haven’t read them all yet--but he’s obviously on a much higher level than almost every other writer I HAVE read. His use of imagery, details, humor, the way he crafts a scene, drawing you into it until you forget you’re reading . . . this is a man in love with, not just words or stories, but with the process itself, this is a man who understands how to use repetition and subtlety. Eugenides is one of those very few writers who’s made writing into a form of magic. You read his words, you see the finished product, but you go over it and over it and you just can’t figure out how he did it. Brilliant.

“Every fourteen seconds Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. This camshaft travels away on a conveyor, curling around the factory, through its clouds of metal dust, its acid fogs, until another worker fifty yards on reaches up and removes the camshaft, fitting it onto the engine block (twenty seconds). Simultaneously, other men are unhooking parts from adjacent conveyors--the carburetor, the distributor, the intake manifold--and connecting them to the engine block. Above their bent heads, huge spindles pound steam-powered fists. No one says a word. Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. The camshaft circles around the floor until a hand reaches up to take it down and attach it the engine block, growing increasingly eccentric now with swooshes of pipe and the plumage of fan blades. Wierzbicki reams a bearing and Stephanides grinds a bearing and O’Malley attaches a bearing to a camshaft. While other workers screw in the air filter (seventeen seconds) and attach the starter motor (twenty-six seconds) and put on the flywheel. At which point the engine is finished and the last man sends it soaring away . . .”

Who in the hell told Eugenides he could make working in an auto plant interesting to write about? At least to a guy who doesn’t understand the first thing about cars. In one simple paragraph he’s conveyed perfectly the repetitious nature of factory work Or there’s this:

“And so now, having been born, I’m going to rewind the film, so that my pink blanket flies off, my crib scoots across the floor as my umbilical cord reattaches, and I cry as I’m sucked back between my mother’s legs. She gets really fat again. Then back some more as a spoon stops swinging and a thermometer goes back into its velvet case. Sputnik chases its rocket trail back to the launching pad and polio stalks the land. There’s a quick shot of my father as a twenty-year-old clarinetist, playing an Artie Shaw number into the phone, and then he’s in church, age eight, being scandalized by the price of candles; and next my grandfather is untaping his first U.S. dollar bill over a cash register in 1931. Then we’re out of America completely; we’re in the middle of the ocean, the sound track sounding funny in reverse. A steamship appears, and up on deck a lifeboat is curiously rocking; but then the boat docks, stern first, and we’re up on dry land again, where the film unspools, back at the beginning.”

Come on, no one writes like that. But they should. There are some books every writer should be required to read. There’s Chuck Palanhiuk’s FIGHT CLUB, Mary Doria Russell’s THE SPARROW, Harlan Ellison’s THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON, Ray Bradbury’s DANDELION WINE, Adrienne Jones’s THE HOAX, King and Straub’s THE TALISMAN, and MIDDLESEX by Jeffrey Eugenides. THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE is only going to teach you the mechanics. These novels will teach you the magic.

Start wherever you want with that list, but if you’re serious at all about being a great writer, read them, pay attention to the focus and devotion each author invested, and learn as much as you can from them. As far as MIDDLESEX is concerned, I would never have believed a 60-year history lesson on Greek immigrants, leading up to the self-discovery of Calliope’s true identity would be so interesting. But for me, this is one of the few truly “unputdownable” books I’ve ever read. Highly recommended.