Posted on April 15, 2006 by Nancy Callahan

“I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.”

An engaging first sentence, to be sure–but was the rest of the book as engaging?

Yes–though, for being the 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner, Middlesex wasn’t as superlatively good as I thought it would be.

Jeffrey Eugenides, who also wrote The Virgin Suicides, here gives us the story of 3 generations of a Greek-American family as narrated by Cal (Calliope), a hermaphrodite who is raised as a female but who more strongly identifies with his/her male side.

What I liked best was the ending: it wrapped things up really well and answered a few questions I’d been pondering for, oh, several hundred pages. The end was both worthy and poignant, and it bolstered my opinion of the novel overall.

I disliked the sloppy handling of perspective, though. In some parts, young (female) Cal narrated, in others it was adult (male) Cal, and in others it jumped from third person to omniscient, impossibly enough. I was jolted by this–it’s just not fair to break the rules mid-stream.

It doesn’t make my list of all-time favorites, but I’d definitely recommend Middlesex to anyone looking for a good read.

Buy:
Middlesex at Amazon
Middlesex at Barnes & Noble