Cal Stephanides is a hermaphrodite living in Detroit. Because of a misdiagnosis at birth he has been brought up as a girl but puberty reveals the truth. This book, a cross between an epic family saga and the Great American Novel, traces her family from its roots in Greek Turkey, through emigration to Detroit, and in so doing explains the genetic abnormality. It then poses the terrible question: what to do about it.
So it starts off as a historical novel, explaining how the narrator's father's parents, Lefty and Desdemona, are brother and sister, fleeing the Turkish destruction of Smyrna, getting married on board ship and settling in Detroit with the narrator's other grandparents, Jimmy, a bootlegger, and Aunt Sourmelina, a lesbian ("Lina was one of those women that named the island after."; Book Two: Henry Ford's English Language Melting Point. Lefty and Desdemona's son, Milton, marries Tessa, the daughter of Jimmy and Sourmelina. They have a son, Chapter Eleven (whose name is never explained but is presumably to do with bankruptcy) and Calliope.
About half-way through, the book metamorphoses into a bildungsroman (a novel about growing up) and we start to follow the trials and troubles of Calliope and 'she' enters puberty and grows towards manhood.
It is a huge canvas. On the one hand the author is writing about the experience of intersex and transsexual people; on the other hand there is a great deal of social commentary and the author is clearly using the experiences of the family to explore the development of modern America. Eugenides has said that because he was writing about something so far removed from his own experience he had to ground it in as much reality as possible and therefore mined the true stories of his family (including where they grew up, on Middlesex Road in Detroit.
The characterisation of Lefty, the grandfather, and Milton, the father, is brilliant. The acute observation of the behavioural differences between man and woman, and the using of these traits and habits to build a whole person, is superb. The historical moments, which include Henry Ford's attempts to ensure morality in his workers, the birth of the Nation of Islam, and the 1967 Detroit race riots, are fascinating.
Selected Quotes:
- "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." (Book One: The Silver Spoon; first lines)
- "Desdemona became what she'd remain for the rest of her life: a sick person imprisoned in a healthy body." (Book One: Matchmaking)
- "Desdemona had no idea what was happening. She didn't envision her insides as a vast computer code, all 1s and 0s, an infinity of sequences, any one of which might contain a bug." (Book One: Matchmaking)
- "He felt a mad jealousy towards his infant son ... who had muscled his own father aside in Desdemona's affections by a seemingly divine subterfuge, a god taking the form of a piglet in order to suckle at a woman's breast." (Book Two: Marriage on Ice)
- "Is there anything as incredible as the love story of your own parents? Anything as hard to grasp as the fact that those two over-the-hill players, permanently on the disabled list, were once in the starting line-up?" (Book Two: Clarinet Serenade)
- "Chapter Eleven was geeky, nerdy. His body was a stalk supporting the tulip of his brain." (Book Three: The Mediterranean Diet)
- "There is no evidence against genetic determinism more persuasive than the children of the rich." (Book Three: The Wolverette)
- "Sandbox sex. It starts in the teens and lasts until twenty or twenty-one. It's all about learning to share. It's about sharing your toys." (Book Three: The Gun on the Wall) I'm not sure about this one. I would have run the last two sentences together, to avoid the repetition: It's all about learning to share your toys.
- "Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye." (Book Four: The Last Stop)
An epic. Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The Virgin Suicides, the debut novel of Jeffrey Eugenides, is also reviewed in this blog.
February 2023; 529 pages
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