Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

Remember in high school when you had to read the Scarlet Letter? Remember the thorough bludgeoning you got with the heavy-handed symbolism? Prepare yourself for the Scarlet Letter II - this time with hermaphrodites! Of course, the story is not at all the same, but what is similar is Eugenides reliance on overblown symbolism and foreshadowing. In what I like to call 'the introduction/setting the scene,' Eugenides spends roughly half of the book just working his way up to the narrator's birth. His family history is bogged down time and again with too much historical detail, interspersed with tantalizing glimpses of the narrator's present-day life, intended, I believe, to goad the reader into slogging through the muck and debris of the background story.

When you finally get to Calliope telling her story about herself, it's a relief. We can finally read about something interesting, like a hermaphrodite who was raised as a girl and (the reader knows) ends up deciding to switch to living as a man. However, even in this section, the narrative switches without warning or delineation between Calliope as a first-person narrator and Calliope as a third-person narrator, switching between 'she' and 'I.'

The story is engaging, but Eugenides can't seem to settle on a story about Calliope or a story about her family leading up to her birth, and the result is a story whose general thrust is rather muddled. Maybe that's the point - Calliope is a mix of two divergent things, so the book is too. But frankly, it doesn't work. For all its hulabaloo and its Pulitzer prize, Middlesex doesn't really do it for me.