What I'm Reading #30: Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)

Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Since I'm driving to Fayetteville and back (and hour and a half each way) twice a week this semester, I've turned to audiobooks. Middlesex is a novel I've been meaning to read for a while, and this seemed like as good a time as any. And so, after 3 weeks of driving for class, plus listening to it in the car pretty much every time I drove in between, I finished the book.

Middlesex is the story of Cal, a male hermaphrodite who was raised as Callie, a girl, until adolescence. But it is much more than that. Eugenides, drawing on his own Greek heritage, traces the history of the gene that caused Cal's 5-alpha-reductase deficiency back to a mountain village in early 20th-century Greece. Eugenides tells of how the recessive gene traveled through the generations, coming closer to the service when cousins or siblings intermarried, manifesting itself occasionally in the small village until eventually it crossed the Atlantic with Cal's grandparents (who were really brother and sister) to Detroit in 1922.

With the morbidity typical of an American today, I just wanted details about Cal's "disorder." But Eugenides refused to objectify or commodify his "condition." And so, at first I grew a little impatient with the long back story about the two generations prior to Cal—but Eugenides quickly drew me in with his language and storytelling, making me care about people and things I hadn't originally come to see.

This book is really a family saga, the section devoted to Cal a coming-of-age story fraught with all the usual struggles of adolescence, but with a slightly different tone in Cal's case. Part of why I wanted to read this book is that I'm finding myself a little more interested in gender constructs and lacking language to deal with them, particularly in a church setting. As much as the church struggles with homosexuality, it blanches even more obviously on questions of transsexuality; but a hermaphrodite is someone whose gender ambiguity is very literally something with which they are born, and we can't draw the same lines as easily. I don't know that I was necessarily enlightened about gender theory at all, because that wasn't really the purpose of this book; but reading (or listening to) Middlesex did allow me to enter into the heart and mind of a young person for whom gender and sexuality were, at best, ambiguous and confusing.

Cal struggles in the book with being labelled a "freak" or even a "monster." Society doesn't deal well with things it doesn't understand. But it seems to me that the solution is at once simple and extremely difficult: when faced with a person whose circumstance or "condition" we do not understand, we must prioritize his or her personhood over whatever baffles us. We must be willing to hear his or her story as a fellow human being, not so that we might diagnose or explain, but so that we might make relationship more important that categorization. This requires the hard work of getting to know someone, but there is no substitute if we would seek an alternative to fear and alienation.