Middlesex (novel)

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Middlesex

Author	Jeffrey Eugenides
Cover artist	William Webb (Bloomsbury paperback)
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK) Farrar, Straus and Giroux (USA)
Publication date	7 October 2002
Media type	Print (Paperback and Hardback) and audio-CD
Pages	529 pp (Bloomsbury paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-374-19969-8 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover) ISBN 0-7475-6162-1 (Bloomsbury paperback)

Middlesex is a novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. It was published in 2002 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003. On June 5, 2007, Oprah Winfrey announced that the novel would be the summer 2007 selection for Oprah's Book Club.

The narrator and protagonist, Calliope Stephanides (later called "Cal"), an intersexed person of Greek descent, has 5-alpha-reductase deficiency. The bulk of the novel is devoted to telling his coming-of-age story growing up in Detroit, Michigan in the late 20th century. This story, however, is intertwined with elements of a family saga, meditations on the era's zeitgeist and bits of contemporary history.

[edit] Plot summary

The novel begins with the narrator, aged 41, deciding to tell the story of his recessive gene that caused him to be born Calliope and later to become Cal. The narration periodically returns to the frame story of present-day Cal, who is bearded, male and interested in women, foreshadowing the personal revelations of Calliope. The narration briefly explains how Desdemona, Cal's grandmother, predicted her grandchild to be male while Calliope's parents had already made schemes they believed would result in a daughter. The narration in the story periodically jumps from Cal as an omniscient narrator to present day Cal, who identifies as male and references his XY chromosomal status, and who dates women. This foreshadows the revelations of young, female-identified Calliope.

The story starts again further back in time, in a small village in Asia Minor, with the story of the protagonist's Greek paternal grandparents. War orphans Eleutherios ("Lefty") Stephanides and his sister Desdemona fall in love. The pair seek refuge by emigrating to America in the aftermath of the 1922 war between Greece and Turkey, amid graphic scenes of the Pontic Greek Genocide. Fleeing incognito, they are free to marry without risking social stigma and legal prohibitions. They settle in Detroit, Michigan, home of their cousin Sourmelina ("Lina", their American sponsor) and her husband.

Desdemona is made aware of the potential for disease in children due to consanguinity and becomes anxious about her pregnancy. The Great Depression in Detroit forces Desdemona to get a job. Only having experience with sericulture, she is hired by the early Nation of Islam and hears Fard speak through the building ventilation system. She accidentally meets Fard in person and he speaks to her as Jimmy Zizmo, Lina's husband and Lefty's business partner running liquor in the 1920s.

Lefty and Desdemona have a son, Milton, who marries Lina's daughter, Tessie. Milton and Tessie, who are second cousins, have two children. "Chapter Eleven" (possibly a reference to the fact that he eventually bankrupts the family business) is a normal boy, but Calliope is intersexed, although the family doesn't know about it for many years, and is raised as a girl. During the Detroit race riots Calliope rides her bicycle behind the tanks looking for her father. From the present, Cal states that he doesn't think that decision had anything to do with hormone levels or chromosomal status.

At fourteen, Calliope falls in love with her female best friend (referred to in the novel as "The Obscure Object") and has her first sexual experiences with both sexes. After an accident, a doctor discovers that Calliope is intersexed, and she is taken to a clinic in New York where she undergoes a series of tests and examinations. Faced with the prospect of sex reassignment surgery, Calliope runs away and takes the male identity of Cal. Cal hitchhikes cross-country, finally arriving in San Francisco, where he becomes an attraction in a burlesque show.

Her father Milton, back in Detroit, repeatedly receives phone calls from an anonymous man saying he knows where Calliope is, and will release her to him if he gives him $25,000. Milton, to make sure, asks the man what village Calliope's grandparents are from, and the man replies, Bithynios, near Smyrna, which is the correct answer. Milton goes to the agreed upon location (the train station where Desdemona and Lefty met Sourmelina when they first came to Detroit), and drops the money. He changes his mind though, figuring that something isn't right, and finds that it's his priest brother-in-law and his wife's former fiancé, Father Mike. This leads to a car chase to the Canadian border, where Milton is killed in a pile-up, and Father Mike is arrested.

The club where Cal worked is raided by police (because Cal is underage), and Cal is returned into Chapter Eleven's custody, and the two fly back to Grosse Pointe for the funeral. The book ends after Desdemona confesses to Cal that Lefty was her brother after Desdemona sees Cal as male for the first time; Cal stands in the doorway to the family's Middlesex home (a Greek tradition touted to keep spirits of the dead out of the family home) while Milton's funeral takes place.