By Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)
Middlesex is another case of high expectations – I didn’t read The Virgin Suicides until recently, but it was definitely close to the top of my fiction list last year. That book is incredibly economical, unforgettably eerie and has a genuinely innovative use of a collective unreliable narrator in the neighborhood boys.
Unfortunately I’m not sure Middlesex quite lives up to this. A sprawling – and comparatively conventional – family chronicle, the story follows three generations of a Greek family fleeing war-torn Anatolia in the 20s and settling in Detroit. The novelty here is the connecting thread is the passing down of a recessive gene – having its fateful expression in inbreeding and intersexuality.
Humanistic and amiable throughout … but doesn’t quite gel
The handling of this material is humanistic and amiable throughout. But I get a sense that several disparate ideas (Eugenides’ Greek heritage, hermaphoditism, fate) have been grafted together and don’t quite gel. It seems to be reflected in the structure of the book, the whole first 4/5ths of which are devoted to the picaresque history of the previous generations of the family.
Some of this is a bit unbelievable in itself (at one point, a well established character fakes his own death and ends up as the founder of the Nation of Islam!). It’s only in the last fifth we arrive at the point of addressing the protagonist’s crisis, which the reader has been expecting for a while – and then it feels a little cursory.
There is something interesting going on with multiple narrators here too. The entire book is supposed to be written by the protagonist; but this seems to imply a mystical knowledge of aspects of history he cannot know about. Is this intentional, and something unusual going on? I’m inclined not to think so.
Still, engrossing and well-written on a page-by-page level.