How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Those Greeks and their hermaphrodites! Teiresias, the seer who futilely haunts so many Greek tragedies, was one. Having enjoyed the special privilege of living as both a male and a female, he was asked by the gods to settle an argument about which of the two sexes had more pleasure from lovemaking; on asserting that the female did, he was struck blind by prudish Hera—but given the gift of prophecy by Zeus as a compensation. The minor deity Hermaphroditus, of course, was another, appearing in religion (there is evidence of dedications to the god as early as the third century B.C. in Attica), in literature (Ovid, in the fourth book of the Metamorphoses, elaborates the mythic narrative in which this son of Hermes and Aphrodite was joined in one body with the nymph Salmacis), and in art, where the opportunities for imaginative representations of this strange creature proved irresistible, predictably enough, to Hellenistic sculptors, with their penchant for the extreme.

  The most famous of these sculpted hermaphrodites is a Greek one from about 150 B.C., which survives in Roman copies such as the one to be found in the “Hermaphrodite Room” in the Uffizi. At first glance, the figure seems to be that of a sleeping woman. She lies facedown, and is quite voluptuous: her breasts, pressed against the couch on which she reclines, are full, as are her hips. Her hair is carefully, fashionably coiffed. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary female. For there, peeking out of the voluminous folds of her gown, is a penis, as modest and perfectly formed as any of the unassuming members familiar from countless classical nudes. Male nudes, that is.

  To this catalogue we may now add another Greek, Calliope Stephanides, the heroine—and later the hero (“Cal”)—of Jeffrey Eugenides’ second novel, which is slyly entitled Middlesex. The title ostensibly refers to the name of the street in Grosse Pointe, Michigan (a state that is itself a “middle”), where much of the novel is set; but of course, it’s really about another kind of middle altogether. For adorable little Callie turns out, by the novel’s end, to be a boy—one who suffers from a rare genetic disorder that causes a type of male pseudohermaphroditism. Although chromosomally male (she has both an X and a Y), she has no real penis, but instead a kind of extended clitoris which she will refer to as “the crocus”; she has testes, but they remain undescended. As a result of this she is misidentified at birth as being a girl and is raised as a girl by her amusingly neurotic, upper-middle-class Greek-American parents. Until puberty, that is, when her male hormones kick in and it becomes increasingly evident that she is no ordinary female. (For one thing, she doesn’t menstruate, although she tries mightily to fake it: “I did cramps the way Meryl Streep does accents.”) It is only after a road accident lands her in an emergency room that Callie and her bewildered family realize how extraordinary she really is. Middlesex, then, is a Bildungsroman with a rather big twist: the Bildung it describes turns out to be the wrong one—a false start.

  From Ovid to Gore Vidal, hermaphroditism and bisexuality have provided writers with irresistible occasions to comment on both Nature and Culture. Eugenides—whose small, nearly perfect first novel, The Virgin Suicides, reflected a Greek tragic sensibility, with its chorus-like first-person-plural narration and its self-immolating young heroines, like something out of Euripides—is well aware of the opportunities his choice of subject has afforded. (In the new novel, the author’s allusions to the—his—Greek literary heritage tend to be on the jokey side, consisting of mock-epic invocations of the Muses: “Sing, Muse, of Greek ladies and their battle against unsightly hair!” and so on.) The tension between who Callie is raised to be and who Cal ends up being, between his early life as a girl and his subsequent life as a man, is clearly an occasion for musing upon all kinds of bimorphisms and dualities. Among these are: the ironies of being a “hyphenated” American of recent vintage (“In America, England is where you go to wash yourself of ethnicity”: so observes a sardonic Callie, the big-nosed, dark-haired child of first-generation Greek-Americans, who ends up attending a Waspy private girls’ school); the horrors of racial conflict (a major set piece of the novel takes place during the 1967 Detroit race riots); and, indeed, the entire global geopolitical picture. Reminiscing about his family’s reaction to the 1974 Cyprus crisis, the adult Cal, who ends up a career diplomat stationed in Berlin, remarks knowingly that now Cyprus was “like Berlin, like Korea, like all the other places in the world that were no longer one thing or the other.” Elsewhere, he ruefully observes that both he and the once-torn city are seeking “unification…Einheit.”

  And yet Einheit is what Middlesex itself ultimately lacks. Eugenides’ novel seems itself to be composed of two distinct and occasionally warring halves. One part has to do with hermaphrodites—with Callie’s condition, and how she comes to discover what she “really” is. The other, far more successful part has to do with Greeks—and, in a way, Greekness. Far more colorful than the story of what Callie is, is the story of how she came to be that way—the story of why this child came to inherit the exceedingly rare and fateful gene that ends up defining her indefinable life. This story, the real heart of the novel, is an old-fashioned family saga—as full of incest, violence, and terrible family secrets that make themselves felt from one generation to the next as anything you find in Sophocles, a junior high school performance of whose Antigone plays, indeed, a crucial role in the plot. Needless to say, Callie gets cast as Teiresias.

  Everything in Middlesex that has to do with the (to say the least) eccentric Stephanides clan is lively and original, fulfilling the promise of The Virgin Suicides nearly a decade ago. It’s a measure of Eugenides’ self-confidence that he spills the novel’s most sensational secret—that Callie’s paternal grandparents, Desdemona and Eleutherios (“Lefty”) Stephanides, are actually brother and sister—early on. To his credit, if the incest theme holds your attention, it’s not so much because it’s the key to Callie’s genetic inheritance as because of the unusually understated way that the author handles it. The opening pages of Eugenides’ book, with its description of the young Desdemona’s and Lefty’s claustrophobic lives in a tiny Anatolian village near Smyrna in the early 1920s, are so tenderly rendered as to make this strange love seem natural. Orphaned during the Greco-Ottoman violence that culminated in the 1922 Turkish massacre of the Greeks of Smyrna, the voluptuous, fiercely proper Desdemona and her jaunty younger brother (who uncomprehendingly warbles American pop tunes as he gets dressed in the morning) are left alone to tend the family’s silk farm on the slopes of a mountain overlooking Bursa, the ancient Ottoman capital. With considerable delicacy and not a little humor—Cal’s narrative voice is rather jaunty throughout—Eugenides explores the ferocity that can characterize the feelings that siblings living in isolated places have for each other. (“Lefty was one year younger than Desdemona and she often wondered how she’d survived those first twelve months without him.”)

  Here as elsewhere in the novel—and here more successfully than elsewhere—Eugenides weaves one family’s story into that of a whole nation. As the brother and sister try to resist the storm of passion that has seized them, the storm clouds of war gather around them. Their efforts at resisting each other are, occasionally, comic: an increasingly desperate Desdemona futilely gives beauty tips to the only other marriageable girls in the village, hoping they’ll look more attractive to a disdainful Lefty, who spends his time in the brothels of Bursa, choosing girls who have his sister’s dark braids and full figure. But incest turns out to be the least of their worries. In these vivid opening pages the author recalls, not without a wry bitterness that is almost a genetic inheritance of many younger descendants of certain Greek immigrants, the Greek government’s ill-fated plan to reclaim its ancient Anatolian territories—the scheme known as the Megala Idea, the “Big Idea.” That scheme notoriously ended in disaster for the Hellenes: it helped the triumphant rise of Ataturk and, in 1922, culminated in the Turkish army’s burning of Smyrna and the murder of over one hundred thousand of that city’s Greek inhabitants—an event that provides this first of
the novel’s four main sections with its unforgettable and brilliantly narrated set piece. The carnage of the Smyrna cataclysm is, moreover, skillfully woven into the Stephanides saga: for it becomes a cover for the two orphaned siblings to consummate their long-burning lust for each other, and to emigrate as man and wife.

  Many of the pleasures to be had from Eugenides’ book are the pleasures to be had from any good immigrant family novel. For the first two hundred of Eugenides’ five-hundred-plus pages, you’re so absorbed in the saga of the Stephanideses’ attempt to establish themselves in their new country that you’re tempted to forget that this is all, in its way, preamble—an elaborate explication of how Callie came to inherit her special gene. These richly emotional—and, often, richly comic—pages move, in classic European immigrant–literature fashion, both geographically westward and economically upward. Interwoven with sardonic, fashionably postmodern commentary by the grown-up Cal, the plot follows Lefty and Desdemona from their arrival at Ellis Island (“A least it’s a woman,” Desdemona says, warily eyeing the Statue of Liberty. “Maybe here people won’t be killing each other every single day”), to their journey west to Detroit. There, their first cousin Sourmalina, a thoroughly Americanized young woman with some secrets of her own—she was kicked out of the village after being found in a compromising position with a married woman—awaits them. She is the only person to whom they ever confess their terrible secret, using her own past as leverage.

  Eugenides’ sprawling narrative continues on from the birth of Desdemona and Lefty’s son, Miltiades (Milt), who will become Callie’s father, through the Depression (Lefty’s brief career as a gangster ends when Prohibition ends and he becomes a popular barkeep). It gradually shifts focus to Milt and his youth and young adulthood during the Second World War, lingering on his fanciful courtship of Sourmalina’s daughter Tessie, whom he eventually marries (he charms her with his clarinet-playing, and then with his clarinet itself, which he places against various parts of her body as he plays); then it shifts from the loss of Milt’s first business during the 1967 Detroit race riots to his founding—partly by means of an insurance settlement after the riots—of a successful restaurant chain that brings him thoroughly American success while invoking his ethnic past. (The chain is called “Hercules Hot Dogs.”) And so the story goes on, shifting finally to Callie herself, as she grows up and, during yet another Turkish invasion—the 1974 Cyprus crisis—discovers the mystery of her own identity. (Not all of the author’s attempts to pin family history to national history work: two long sections about the Stephanides family’s dealings with blacks—and, by extension, about America’s race problems—come off as preachy and rather nervous. The seven-year-old Callie’s observations that the 1967 riots are “nothing less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution” stretch credulity to the breaking point.)

  It’s hard not to feel, as you make your way through this often engrossing and fluently narrated saga, that the Stephanideses’ story is the story that Eugenides really wants to tell—a story of Greek immigrants as only one who has hungrily absorbed such stories from birth can retell them. This narrative is populated by memorable characters who have all the hard, unexpected contours of real people: Lefty, struck dumb by a stroke, meticulously translating Sappho every day, smoking hashish and listening to rebetika albums in his attic room while communicating with his family by means of a chalkboard; the ferocious and self-consciously “self-made” Milt, arguing politics with the Marxist girlfriend that Callie’s older brother brings home from college during the Sixties (“Well, if giving somebody a job is exploiting them, then I guess I’m an exploiter”); Uncle Mike, the Orthodox priest who’s married to Milt’s sister but loves Tessie; Tessie herself, anxious and ever hopeful that her daughter will finally start menstruating. Eugenides gives these characters authentic voices that rescue them from being adorable caricatures—always a danger with immigrant stories. Indeed, perhaps because they are voices the author has heard, these ring true in a way that Callie’s, and Cal’s, never does.

  This author has a remarkably good ear for the rhythms not only of immigrant speech, but of immigrant thought. The elderly, bleakly fatalistic Desdemona’s pleasure in commercials for detergents, with their “animating scrubbing bubbles and avenging suds,” tells you more about her particular brand of grim Puritanism—the prudishness of a woman who has lived most of her life burdened with secret guilt—than five pages of earnest psychologizing could. You have no problem believing that this is a woman who, when vexed by a family member—as when, for instance, her son, Milt, decides that he won’t have the infant Callie baptized—starts fanning herself furiously with one of the very special fans that she collects:

  The front of the fan was emblazoned with the words “Turkish Atrocities.” Below, in smaller print, were the specifics: the 1955 pogrom in Istanbul in which 15 Greeks were killed, 200 Greek women raped, 4,348 stores looted, 59 Orthodox churches destroyed, and even the graves of the Patriarchs desecrated. Desdemona had six atrocity fans. They were a collector’s set. Each year she sent a contribution to the Partriarchate in Constantinople, and a few weeks later a new fan arrived, making claims of genocide…. Not appearing on Desdemona’s particular fan that day, but denounced nonetheless, was the most recent crime, committed not by the Turks but by her own Greek son, who refused to give his daughter a proper Orthodox baptism.

  It is at the baptism—for of course Desdemona eventually gets her way—that Callie, whose abbreviated, penis-like member is so well hidden by the folds of skin around her genitals that Tessie’s obstetrician thinks the infant is a girl, urinates on the priest, the stream “ris[ing] in an arc,” much to the atheistic Milt’s delight. An arc? “In all the commotion,” the adult Cal dryly remarks, “no one wondered about the engineering involved.”

  The engineering involved brings us to the other part of Middlesex: the hermaphrodite’s tale, the material that gives this classic immigrant saga its special, au courant twist. Ironically, this ostensibly more sensational material turns out to be the flatter, less interesting half of Eugenides’ hybrid book.

  The literary interest of a novel with this subject lies, inevitably, in the author’s obligation to create a uniquely doubled, and mixed, voice. What would a voice that had been both male and female—the voice of Teiresias—really sound like? And yet the author’s feel for hermaphrodites isn’t nearly as sure as his grasp on Hellenes: throughout Middlesex, you feel that he’s evading what he should be confronting, both stylistically and intellectually. For one thing, he gets around the problem of having to invent a new kind of voice—even the problem of having to ventriloquize convincingly a young midwestern Greek-American girl—by narrating his hybrid story in the voice of the adult, and decidedly male, Cal. How much more stylish and persuasive this book would have been had he constructed the narrative as something other than a flashback, so that the voice of the girlish Callie could have sounded different—interestingly, meaningfully different—from the voice of the male adult she becomes.

  One result of this tonal problem is that Callie always feels like a cipher: surprisingly—given her remarkable predicament—she’s not nearly as colorful or interesting as her less problematic relatives. She’s a notion rather than a character, someone you’re constantly being told about rather than someone whose mind, as in the greatest fiction, you actually get to inhabit. It’s not that Eugenides can’t persuasively do unusual voices: in The Virgin Suicides, he invented a plural narrator to better articulate the inchoate and intense yearning peculiar to adolescence. All the more strange, then, that the lengthy section of the new novel devoted to the event that awakens Callie’s sense of being “different”—a fierce crush on a junior high school classmate identified throughout the novel as “the Obscure Object” (a moniker that the author laboriously goes on to explain, giving a plot summary of the Buñuel film)—feels so uninspired and predictable. If so, I suspect it’s because Eugenides—which is to say, Cal—isn’t quite comfortable in Cal
lie’s skin. The “chorus” that made up his first book’s collective narrator was so convincing because of the poignant tension between their adult hindsight and the boyish yearning (for the dead girls whom they desired) that was still evident in that collective voice. None of this textured quality emerges in Cal’s description of Callie’s infatuation with the “O.O.,” which is a fairly standard narration of a fairly ordinary adolescent crush. (It’s true that efforts have been made to suggest the atmosphere of adolescent girlhood: there’s a lot about the feverish social politics of Callie’s all-girl school—the misfits, the “Charm Bracelets,” and so on—but unlike virtually everything about The Virgin Suicides, this material, like so much of what we learn about Callie, feels studied, learned.)

  The failure of this central character to feel authentic hampers the larger effects the novel wants to make. Not the least of these is the emotional impact it’s meant to have. Toward the end of Middlesex, Callie starts doing some research on some terms she’s seen in a doctor’s report about her, and (after looking up some words in an encyclopedia) notes, with understandable grief, that one synonym for what she is is “MONSTER.” The scene is meant to be moving—climactically moving, even—but it doesn’t work because you’ve never really gotten to know this monster intimately; you know about her what you might have guessed anyway just from having heard what the basic plot is. (The scrim of the narrator’s sardonic, postmodern sensibility, fashionable just now among writers in their forties, doesn’t help matters.) The scene may put you in mind of another famous monster, but only briefly; Mary Shelley was canny enough to know that in order to sympathize with her creature, you had to get inside its head, let it speak for itself.

  If Callie doesn’t really persuade, neither does the adult (and male) Cal, who is equally opaque: he has surprisingly little personality, given all he’s been through, as if having been both male and female has depleted, rather than enriched, his (as he might say) Weltanschauung. You finish the novel without knowing much about him, apart from his penchant for saying sardonic things about Berlin and Einheit and for making vaguely postmodern narrative gestures (“which brings me to the final complication in that overplotted year”). Speaking of overplotting: a tenuous subplot, set in the present and concerned with Cal’s tentative courtship of an Asian-American artist, feels artificial, constructed solely to give an overarching shape to the novel’s four big sections.