Calliope Stephanides, granddaughter of Greek immigrants, knew at age 14 that she was not a normal girl. But it was a car accident followed by a trip to the emergency room that began to unravel the mystery she carried for all those years and the secret her family carried for three generations. Dr. Phil, the family physician who fled a small village in Asia Minor along with Calliope’s grandparents, missed it when Calliope was born. Calliope’s grandparents were brother and sister, a union that left the fifth chromosome with a latent defect that emerged when Calliope was conceived.
Tessie, Calliope’s mother, and Milton, her father, quietly discussed the issue that Dr. Phil failed to detect for 14 years, while she listened through the walls.
“So what did the doctor say?” Milton was asking. “He said Dr. Phil should have noticed when Callie was born,” Tessie answered. “This whole thing could have been fixed back then.” And then Milton again, “I can’t believe he’d miss something like that.” (Like what? I silently asked the wall, but it didn’t specify.)
Calliope was a hermaphrodite, born with the sexual characteristics of both sexes and destined to lead confused life as a result and when late in the book is confronted with a New York expert in a sexual identity clinic who recommends surgical and hormonal removal of vestiges of male gender, flees and becomes what she realized she was from the start—a man.
The book is sprinkled with stories of how adult Cal works for the State Department and dabbles with dating, fearful and withdrawing before he can become involved with a love relationship. The story follows the family through Prohibition, automation, World War II, and post war affluence. The steps leading to adulthood are described in brilliant detail, from the grandparents escape from the inferno of the island at war, to their sexual consummation in the canvas-covered lifeboat on a crowded ship enroute to New York, to their eventual arrival in Detroit and nearby Middlesex, where Lefty, the father, takes a job in the burgeoning auto industry dominated by Henry Ford, when auto manufacturing was becoming automated. Author Jeffrey Eugenides playfully describes the rigors and boredom his grandfather endures in mass production.
“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 onto the engine block (twenty seconds). (95)
But it is the opening that spills sentence after sentence of brilliant prose, capturing in a chapter the essence of a life marred by a genetic aberration. “I was born twice, first as a baby girl, on a remarkable smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy in an emergency room near Petroskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” (1)
And later in the introductory chapter, “I was first one thing, then another. I’ve been ridiculed by classmates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the March of Dimes.” (1)
Escaping from the gender surgeon, Cal takes a wild ride west, at first an escape from surgical womanhood to a self-realization of manhood that becomes his identity. Even if you have little or no interest in hermaphrodites, this is a wonderful read full of brilliant passages and keen insight.
Middlesex
ASIN
: 0312427735
Publisher:
Picador; First Edition (June 5, 2002)
Paperback
: 544 pages
ISBN-10: 0274885417
ISBN-13: 978-0312427733