A Review of Jeffrey Eugenides’s book
Middlesex

Middlesex is actually the name of the Stephanides family’s home located on the outskirts of Detroit. At the same time, if the reader considers that name literally, it could suggest a person who is part boy and part girl. And that is the theme of the novel.

Desdemona and Lefty Stephanides were brought up in a small village in Greece, but had to escape by ship in 1922 after the Turks invaded their town. Even though they were closely related, they thought it wise to get married aboard ship to assure their immigration into the United States. After being accepted and released from Ellis Island, they met a relative in Detroit and settled down there for the rest of their lives. They had two children, and then two grandchildren, the youngest of whom, Callie, is the narrator of the story.

From the old country, Desdemona had learned how to hold a spoon over the belly of a pregnant woman and tell the sex of the unborn child. She did this with Tessie, her son’s wife, and made her first mistake in twenty-three previous predictions. She thought that Tessie would have a boy, but she gave birth to a girl, Callie.

Callie had a normal childhood. Her father Milton lost his first restaurant in the Detroit riots of 1967, but later started a hotdog chain which flourished in several states. But since he always wanted a daughter, Callie became his favorite, even more than her older brother whom Callie called Chapter Eleven.

None of the family were bothered about Callie’s delayed sexual development, although she had to hide her mixed feelings about her body from them. Finally, when she was fourteen years old, a New York doctor informed her parents that Callie was a hermaphrodite. To Callie, this meant she was a sexual monster, a freak, so she escaped the treatment the doctor advised and ran away from home.

She didn’t come home till months later, after her father died. She had left a close friend who had similar sexual problems. But she was more optimistic than Callie about their future in the changing world: "Because we’re [hermaphorodites] what’s next."

When Callie got home, only Desdemona, her grandmother, was not surprised about the teenager’s situation. She understood the doctor’s statement about small villages where everyone marries each other, so she revealed her secret to her granddaughter.

Jeffrey Eugenides, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, writes an impelling story, complemented by intriguing description and arrangement of events. MIDDLESEX was published in 2002.