Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus & Giroux

Calliope/Cal Stephanides, the narrator of Jeffrey Eugenides' second novel, "Middlesex," is the "world's most famous hermaphrodite." Raised as a girl, a budding crush on a female classmate and an accident at 14 sends her into a tailspin of self-reflection and visits to doctors, culminating in a decision to live the rest of her life as a man. Most of this takes place toward the end of the book, but it's no surprise — it's previewed throughout by Cal's middle-aged persona, who takes breaks in his narrative to show glimpses of his current life as a Foreign Service officer in Berlin.

The majority of "Middlesex," in fact, predates Calliope/Cal by several decades. The first 300 pages revolve around her grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona, as they emigrate from Greek-held Turkey in the wake of Ataturk's reconquest, settle in Detroit and begin another chapter in the great American immigrant epic (Calliope's namesake being the muse of epic poetry; Eugenides is, at times, anything but subtle). The narrative wends its way through the Great Depression, the birth of Calliope/Cal's parents, World War II and, finally, the birth of Calliope/Cal and her/his brother, whom she/he refers to only as Chapter Eleven (presumably because he later inherits their father's hot-dog stand franchise and runs it into the ground).

Lefty and Desdemona are also brother and sister, and Calliope/Cal's parents are cousins; through the family runs a recessive fifth chromosome that she/he says "first appeared in my bloodline sometime around 1750, in the body of one Penelope Evangelatos, my great-grandmother to the ninth power." Hence Calliope/Cal, who has all the inner-workings of a male but the external genitals of a woman. That hermaphroditism is both metaphor and synecdoche for the immigrant experience is pretty obvious within the first 15 pages; Calliope/Cal is a mixture of chance, genetics and the tumultuous cultural changes wrought by Americanization. She/he is vast and lyric in her/his style (the book is meant to be a memoir), and though the inspiration is the Greek epic the tone is Whitman all the way: "Slippery as a yolk, I dive headfirst into the world." It is the latest great American novel, as told by an extremely unlikely, if highly appropriate, voice.

None of Eugenide's themes are particularly new — identity, sexuality and family all make lengthy appearances — indeed, much of "Middlesex" is little more than a rewriting of the immigrant experience as seen in "The Godfather" or "The Emigrants." But Eugenides' deft, flowing prose saves the novel; he takes well-trampled ground and reseeds it, gives it new life through his vibrant characters and page-turner plot lines.

On the other hand, Eugenides can't control his own creation. Despite narrating, Calliope doesn't arrive on the page until "Middlesex" is halfway over. She/he makes a great symbol, but also a great character, and Eugenides never explores his character's full potential. The story only goes as far as Calliope/Cal's late teens; meanwhile, it's being narrated by a character more than twice that old. What happened in between? What was it like to be a hermaphroditic college student? Foreign Service Cal alludes several times to failed relationships, to the pain of not being fully one gender or another. Granted, to spend too much time on Cal's later life is to detract from the immigrant story at the heart of the book, but nevertheless Eugenides has created such a fascinating character that the reader feels short-changed by his failure to take her/him further.

But "Middlesex" is worth reading nevertheless; if nothing else, it is fun, in a way that much "literary" fiction these days simply isn't. Perhaps this is because, unlike many of his cohorts, Eugenides isn't so enthralled with the toolbox of postmodern literary devices that he sees the need to deploy them whenever he has the chance. It's been a long time since the stylings of Pynchon and Co. were even remotely avant garde; today, like Williamsburg, Wicker Park, the Mission and other well-gentrified hipster neighborhoods, they're little more than a badge, worn by David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen as a way of signifying (and at times simulating) depth. Eugenides doesn't refrain from literary tricks completely — one of the main characters is called Chapter Eleven, after all — but he keeps them in reserve and lets the narrative to dominate.

Eugenides is also knowledgeable and passionate enough about his subjects — whether it be 1930s Detroit or 1970s suburbia — to make his occasional digression more than tolerable. "Middlesex" is not the most amazing book to appear recently, but, despite its expansive reach and cornucopic wealth of characters — it is one of the most human. Which is more than can be said for many of the books with which it shares table space.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)