Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Global-positioning satellites turn us all into snails. Not just size-wise, either. From above, the newer handheld display screens show the path of our movements through the day, leaving gray-green snail trails behind to mark our passage. After a while, especially around the regularly visited coordinates of home or neighborhood, these tracks begin to cross and recross each other until they resemble less a single, traceable path than a trampled, muddy scribble.
Now imagine that someone has planted just such a tracking device on the setting and subject matter of the modern American novel. We see its regrettable concentration over New York like some dense green fog, darkening toward blackness on the Upper West Side, fading to sea foam somewhere out over Jersey. Nationally, we see the novel densely distributed over residential districts, where endless domestic dramas play out, while thinning -- as novelists shun the intricate workings of the business world -- above our downtowns. But there! streaking from post-World War I Greece like a lone emerald comet, setting up shop in a majestically detailed Detroit for most of the 20th century (with occasional zigzags to present-day Berlin), comes Jeffrey Eugenides' unprecedented, astounding new novel, "Middlesex."
Eugenides' story lies just as far off the beaten path as his setting. The author nine years ago of "The Virgin Suicides," Eugenides has shifted from that book's collective narrator to the most singular hero imaginable: a 41- year-old hermaphrodite named Cal, nee Calliope Stephanides. In order to tell the story of his life, Cal ushers the reader all the way back to the courtship of his Greek grandparents, who flee the Turks' genocidal sacking of Smyrna in 1922 and take ship for America, concealing from their fellow immigrants the secret that they are brother and sister. Cal narrates this generational saga from the vantage of a U.S. Foreign Service posting in gradually reintegrating Berlin, where he, too, is attempting to integrate the conflicting halves of his identity so as not to scare away a fetching Japanese American painter.
Stretched like a bowstring between the contemporary prospect of true love and the incestuous union that activated Cal's genetic destiny in the first place, the 80-year story of the Stephanides clan at first sounds too outre to admit entree. Like "The Virgin Suicides," which tells the story of five suburban sisters, each of whom takes her own life during little more than a year, "Middlesex's" premise initially repels all but prurient interest. Where's the universality, the "rootability" necessary to stimulate and sustain reader empathy?
In Cal's voice, that's where. Funny, humane, endearingly self-aware, Cal takes the book's most potentially alienating feature -- it's told by a boy with a vestigial penis who's mistaken for a girl for the first 14 years of his life -- and turns it to improbable, wonderful advantage. Here's a novel that emphatically declines to state whether it's a guy book or a chick book. Instead, it's the most reliably American story there is: A son of
immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak.
And what language, what prose! Lots of novelists write beautifully about diurnal, mundane things, and Eugenides can do that with the best of them. But his rarer power resides in the ability to craft scenes whose freshness of incident matches their freshness of description. Just listen to this paragraph- long set piece, about the casting off of Cal's grandparents' steamer:
"It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red,
yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every 10 seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze."
It's as old a scene as they come, the departure from the old country for the new, but with an image that takes his characters' emotions and makes them enduringly visual, Eugenides pockets it. One thinks of that great scene in Hitchcock's original 1935 "Man Who Knew Too Much," where the hero snags an unraveling thread from a conspirator's swallowtail coat, so as not to lose track of him at a party -- then watches the villain take to the dance floor, inadvertently weaving all the guests together in the web his movements make.
Eugenides has Hitchcock's great knack, often dismissed as "cinematic" when it's simply good storytelling, of instinctively creating the perfect visual symbol to distill the substance of a scene. This happens all through "Middlesex," including an amazing interlude where Cal's dying father hallucinates a last lap around Detroit in an airborne late-model Cadillac.
Among so many other things, this praiseworthy, prize-worthy yarn succeeds as a heartbroken mash note to the Detroit of Eugenides' birth, a city whose neighborhoods he sometimes appears to love -- as he loves his characters -- less for their virtues than for their defects. Any book that can make a reader actively want to visit Detroit must have one honey of a tiger in its tank.
This article appeared on page RV - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Now imagine that someone has planted just such a tracking device on the setting and subject matter of the modern American novel. We see its regrettable concentration over New York like some dense green fog, darkening toward blackness on the Upper West Side, fading to sea foam somewhere out over Jersey. Nationally, we see the novel densely distributed over residential districts, where endless domestic dramas play out, while thinning -- as novelists shun the intricate workings of the business world -- above our downtowns. But there! streaking from post-World War I Greece like a lone emerald comet, setting up shop in a majestically detailed Detroit for most of the 20th century (with occasional zigzags to present-day Berlin), comes Jeffrey Eugenides' unprecedented, astounding new novel, "Middlesex."
Eugenides' story lies just as far off the beaten path as his setting. The author nine years ago of "The Virgin Suicides," Eugenides has shifted from that book's collective narrator to the most singular hero imaginable: a 41- year-old hermaphrodite named Cal, nee Calliope Stephanides. In order to tell the story of his life, Cal ushers the reader all the way back to the courtship of his Greek grandparents, who flee the Turks' genocidal sacking of Smyrna in 1922 and take ship for America, concealing from their fellow immigrants the secret that they are brother and sister. Cal narrates this generational saga from the vantage of a U.S. Foreign Service posting in gradually reintegrating Berlin, where he, too, is attempting to integrate the conflicting halves of his identity so as not to scare away a fetching Japanese American painter.
Stretched like a bowstring between the contemporary prospect of true love and the incestuous union that activated Cal's genetic destiny in the first place, the 80-year story of the Stephanides clan at first sounds too outre to admit entree. Like "The Virgin Suicides," which tells the story of five suburban sisters, each of whom takes her own life during little more than a year, "Middlesex's" premise initially repels all but prurient interest. Where's the universality, the "rootability" necessary to stimulate and sustain reader empathy?
In Cal's voice, that's where. Funny, humane, endearingly self-aware, Cal takes the book's most potentially alienating feature -- it's told by a boy with a vestigial penis who's mistaken for a girl for the first 14 years of his life -- and turns it to improbable, wonderful advantage. Here's a novel that emphatically declines to state whether it's a guy book or a chick book. Instead, it's the most reliably American story there is: A son of
immigrants finally finds love after growing up feeling like a freak.
And what language, what prose! Lots of novelists write beautifully about diurnal, mundane things, and Eugenides can do that with the best of them. But his rarer power resides in the ability to craft scenes whose freshness of incident matches their freshness of description. Just listen to this paragraph- long set piece, about the casting off of Cal's grandparents' steamer:
"It was the custom in those days for passengers leaving for America to bring balls of yarn on deck. Relatives on the pier held the loose ends. As the Giulia blew its horn and moved away from the dock, a few hundred strings of yarn stretched across the water. People shouted farewells, waved furiously, held up babies for last looks they wouldn't remember. Propellers churned; handkerchiefs fluttered, and, up on deck, the balls of yarn began to spin. Red,
yellow, blue, green, they untangled toward the pier, slowly at first, one revolution every 10 seconds, then faster and faster as the boat picked up speed. Passengers held the yarn as long as possible, maintaining the connection to the faces disappearing onshore. But finally, one by one, the balls ran out. The strings of yarn flew free, rising on the breeze."
It's as old a scene as they come, the departure from the old country for the new, but with an image that takes his characters' emotions and makes them enduringly visual, Eugenides pockets it. One thinks of that great scene in Hitchcock's original 1935 "Man Who Knew Too Much," where the hero snags an unraveling thread from a conspirator's swallowtail coat, so as not to lose track of him at a party -- then watches the villain take to the dance floor, inadvertently weaving all the guests together in the web his movements make.
Eugenides has Hitchcock's great knack, often dismissed as "cinematic" when it's simply good storytelling, of instinctively creating the perfect visual symbol to distill the substance of a scene. This happens all through "Middlesex," including an amazing interlude where Cal's dying father hallucinates a last lap around Detroit in an airborne late-model Cadillac.
Among so many other things, this praiseworthy, prize-worthy yarn succeeds as a heartbroken mash note to the Detroit of Eugenides' birth, a city whose neighborhoods he sometimes appears to love -- as he loves his characters -- less for their virtues than for their defects. Any book that can make a reader actively want to visit Detroit must have one honey of a tiger in its tank.
This article appeared on page RV - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
1 comment:
i got "Virgin Suicides" coming in my netflix today.
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