Middlesex

Jeffrey Eugenides’s second novel, published fourteen years after The Virgin Suicides, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003 and demonstrated that his debut was not a fluke but a first movement in a project of unusual scope. Middlesex is a multigenerational family saga narrated by Cal Stephanides-born Callie, a woman who in her teenage years discovers herself to be, genetically, male-and its ambition is nothing less than to write the Greek American immigrant experience and the biological underpinnings of gender identity as a single, continuous story.

The novel opens in Smyrna in 1922, follows the grandparents Lefty and Desdemona through their incestuous marriage and emigration to Detroit, and traces the family through three American generations until Cal’s self-discovery in the 1970s. Eugenides manages this span without losing either the intimacy of family narrative or the historical sweep of the immigrant story; the novel’s structure is its achievement, holding private and collective history in productive tension.

Cal narrates in retrospect, from adulthood, in a tone that balances the ironic distance of hindsight with genuine warmth for the family whose story he is recovering. The prose is confident and pleasurable-Eugenides writes beautifully about Detroit’s neighborhoods across the twentieth century and about the textures of Greek American domestic life with particular vividness.

The novel’s central questions-about the relationship between genetic inheritance and identity, between what we are born with and what we choose-are asked with appropriate complexity; Eugenides does not reduce Cal’s experience to either pure biology or pure social construction. The result is a generous, large-hearted novel that earns its Pulitzer.