Jeffrey Eugenides This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. NY Daily News - Home

   www.nydailynews.com/entertainm - [Cached]

   Published on: 9/15/2002   Last Visited: 9/15/2002

   Jeffrey Eugenides' 'Middlesex' features a novel heroine/hero
   
   ...
   By Jeffrey Eugenides
   ...
   Or rather, so writes Jeffrey Eugenides who, nine years after attracting an audience with "The Virgin Suicides," delivers this easily pleasing novel.
   
   "Middlesex" courses through three generations of a Greek-American family in an epic that is equal parts history and histrionics. This is Eugenides, after all, who has a considerable talent for making the weird wonderful. And, often, meaningful.
   
   The novel's first sentence: "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."
   
   Quite an opening and one that begs explanation. Obviously, therein lies the tale, whose true beginnings are in 1922 on Mount Olympus. (The novel is narrated throughout by Cal who, at least when it comes to his family, is omniscient.)
   
   In the small village of Bithynios, about to be consumed in the savage warfare between Greeks and Turks, Lefty and Desedemona are two fools in love.
   ...
   Eugenides, it seems, is a sociologist in the body of an audacious writer who has a penetrating understanding of the human condition.
   
   Such an entertainer, too.
   
   Certainly the whole of the extended family welcomes the birth of a granddaughter. The matter of her undescended testicles goes undetected for 14 years. By then the Stephanides have moved to the wealthy suburb Grosse Pointe. They live on Middlesex Road.