'Middlesex': My Big Fat Greek Gender Identity Crisis

Even before she's born, Calliope Stephanides's gender is up for debate. Her parents, Milton and Tessie Stephanides of Detroit, want a girl, and a bachelor uncle convinces Milton, ostensibly on the authority of an article in Scientific American magazine, that if the couple have ''sexual congress'' 24 hours prior to ovulation ''the swift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggish but more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped.'' Tessie complies, despite her worries that ''to tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris.'' Once Tessie is pregnant, Milton's mother, Desdemona -- a refugee with her husband, Lefty, from a Greek village on the slopes of Mount Olympus -- dangles a silver spoon tied to a string over the belly of her daughter-in-law and pronounces the child a boy. Her son storms in to protest the divination; the baby is a girl, he insists. ''It's science, Ma.''

They're both right, after a fashion. Callie will spend the 1960's and early 70's, the first years of her life, as the relatively unremarkable daughter of an entrepreneurial Greek-American family, only to discover at 14, in the office of a Manhattan physician, that she is a hermaphrodite -- or, more precisely, a pseudohermaphrodite, a sufferer of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. ''To the extent that fetal hormones affect brain chemistry and histology, I've got a male brain,'' explains Cal, the man Callie decides to become after she learns the truth and the narrator of ''Middlesex,'' Jeffrey Eugenides's expansive and radiantly generous second novel. ''But I was raised as a girl.''


Eugenides's first novel, ''The Virgin Suicides'' (1993), was a dreamy, slender book about the gulf in understanding between the adolescent boys in a Michigan suburb and the five daughters of a strict Roman Catholic couple living in their neighborhood. The boys fill that gulf with romantic obsession, a beast that thrives in a vacuum, and the girls, stricken with a fatal loneliness, die by their own hands like a bevy of unlucky fairy tale princesses. ''Middlesex'' may be an entirely different sort of book -- it's longer, more discursive and funnier, for a start -- but it's equally preoccupied with rifts. There's the gap between male and female, obviously, but also between Greek and WASP, black and white, the old world and the new, the silver spoon and the sluggish sperm. Finally, there is the tug of war between destiny and free will -- an age-old concern of Greek storytellers, as every college freshman learns, reborn in the theories advanced by evolutionary psychology.


Evolutionary psychology, at least in its popular incarnation -- which seems to get more popular every day -- keeps chipping away at the garden-variety humanism espoused by most novelists. That's why it's surprising so few of them (at least within the genre of literary fiction) have bothered to take notice of it. Viewed through a sociobiological lens, infidelity, the novel's favorite meat, is transformed from the stuff of betrayal and moral failing to the mere playing out of a Darwinian reproductive imperative; despair springs from an inherited defect in the regulation of neurochemicals, not from an existential apprehension of the absurdity of the human condition. The tangled parks and gardens that have long been the novelist's stamping grounds are being bulldozed to make way for sleek, sterile industrial complexes where, in cataloging each molecule in the human genome, scientists may ultimately be able to tell us which gene caused Anna Karenina to cheat and gave Oliver Twist the nerve to ask for more gruel.


Cal isn't a faithful adherent of either the nature or the nurture camp; he eventually runs away to avoid undergoing surgery and hormone treatments at the hands of a doctor who thinks that 14 years of living as a girl must count more than the male identity Cal wants to embrace.



Eugenides, after all, is an artist, not a polemicist, and the truth about what shapes us may never be settled. ''Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome,'' Cal vamps in the book's opening pages. (''Sorry if I get a little Homeric at times. That's genetic, too.'') By mimicking an ancient author equally preoccupied by the tension between preordained fate and self-determination, Cal telegraphs a very modern question: Is ''Middlesex'' -- or any novel, for that matter -- the story of its hero/ine or the history of a particular configuration of DNA? As Cal -- sometimes -- chooses to tell it, the novel describes the ''roller coaster ride of a single gene through time,'' how it found its twin in the mingled gametes of Desdemona and Lefty, who, it turns out, are brother and sister as well as husband and wife, able with their freshly minted American identities to consummate a union they could never have gotten away with back in their home village. Practically the whole first half of ''Middlesex,'' like a doorstop biography run amok, takes place before Cal is even born.

If all this makes ''Middlesex'' sound like a novel of ideas, well, it is; but it's several other things too. It's a saga that takes Desdemona and Lefty from the burning of Smyrna through Detroit's purgatorial assembly lines, the shadow economy of Prohibition and the founding of the family's legit businesses, first a bar and then a restaurant. The Stephanideses career through the Depression, World War II, the cataclysmic Detroit race riots of 1967, the counterculture, Watergate, the energy crisis.

''Middlesex'' is also a coming-of-age story, albeit an exceptionally fraught one, as it gradually dawns on the adolescent Callie that there's something seriously odd about her body -- and that she's besotted with a female classmate. There's a bit of road novel as well, when, enlightened as to the actual state of his chromosomes, Cal hitchhikes to -- where else? -- San Francisco. And, finally, there's the sliver of a love story, as the now 41-year-old Cal, ensconced in a safely nomadic State Department career, gingerly courts a Japanese-American photographer, wondering if he can trust her with the surprise between his legs.



Eugenides pitches a big tent, but one of the delights of ''Middlesex'' is how soundly it's constructed, with motifs and characters weaving through the novel's various episodes, pulling it tight. The young Armenian doctor who saves Lefty in Smyrna and sees his own children butchered by Turkish soldiers becomes the aged, bleary-eyed family retainer who overlooks Callie's unusual anatomy. Middlesex, the modern house the Stephanideses manage to purchase in the exclusive suburb of Grosse Pointe (it's too peculiar and unfashionable to sell to WASPs) is ''like communism, better in theory than reality.'' Which makes it also like the blank-slate notion of gender identity advanced by the doctor who wants to drag Cal under the knife.

And while some of the odds and ends Eugenides tosses into the mix (a disquisition on Michael Dukakis, a supporting character's bizarre connection to the Nation of Islam) don't quite integrate, far more often than not the novel feels rich with treats, including some handsome writing. When the author describes the pulchritudinous teenage Desdemona's braids as ''not delicate like a little girl's but heavy and womanly, possessing a natural power, like a beaver's tail,'' for example, the metaphor has an elemental eroticism worthy of Hardy.

Because it's long and wide and full of stuff, ''Middlesex'' will be associated by some readers with books by David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen, brilliant members of Eugenides's cohort. Those writers, however, have more satirical, even self-lacerating inclinations; there can be an air of penance to their work (as there is to ''The Virgin Suicides''). Here, at least, Eugenides is sunnier; the book's length feels like its author's arms stretching farther and farther to encompass more people, more life. His narrator is a soul who inhabits a liminal realm, a creature able to bridge the divisions that plague humanity, endowed with ''the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both.'' That utopian reach makes ''Middlesex'' deliriously American; the novel's patron saint is Walt Whitman, and it has some of the shagginess of that poet's verse to go along with the exuberance. But mostly it is a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination and of love.