Middlesex

Occasionally, a novel comes along that takes you completely by surprise. In spite of the numerous glowing reviews from newspapers and literary journals that adorn five pages of the paperback edition of this book, the story as encapsulated in the blurb just doesn't sound that interesting. Calliope, born and raised as a girl in a second-generation Greek family in Detroit, discovers as a fourteen-year-old that she is in fact an hermaphrodite and subsequently chooses to live her life as a man.

So far, so unusual-for-the-sake-of-it. In fact, the book is a masterpiece, a wry, hilarious, moving, 500-pages-plus, charging elephant of a novel that ideally would never have come to an end (but did so magnificently). The Great American Novel is a hackneyed concept, but great novels by Americans are certainly not in short supply at the moment. If Eugenides can be accused of using themes well-worn by other authors (sprawling European immigrant families, the trials and tribulations of adolescence, the powerhouse of U.S. industry, the sixties), he weaves them together with a self-evident delight that is compelling and infectious. Calliope's ambiguous sexuality is an integral part of her story, but for much of her childhood it is a ghostly presence, affecting her in ways she does not understand until later. Eugenides skilfully manages to convey this and moreover includes his more medical information in a light and assured way.

In Callie, in particular, he has created a narrator with a wonderfully-realised and believable voice; clearly he loves her and so do we; never for a moment does our belief or interest in her falter.

For once, those pages of reviews were right; Middlesex does indeed prove to be 'a transatlantic epic', sumptuously enjoyable', 'a comic epic', 'weird and wonderful' and, as Jay McInerney put it,' a great Greek-American hermaphrodite epic that we didn't realise we needed until we read it.'


More Great American novels (of the twentieth century):

The Corrections Jonathan Franzen
The Sportswriter and Independence Day Richard Ford
Rabbit novels of John Updike
The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
Underworld Don de Lillo
The Adventures of Augie March Saul Bellow