kthread reads: middlesex
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
rating: 4 of 5 stars
About a month ago, online buzz surrounded a “gender analyzer” tool designed to determine whether a Web site was written by a man or a woman.
I was reminded of the flurry of indignation and amusement caused by the tool (on my personal site: “We guess http://kthread.com is written by a man (58%), however it’s quite gender neutral. Is this correct?”) in the review my friend David posted of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex the other day:
Despite the fact that the author of the book is male – as is the narrator – I often thought of the narration as neither male nor female. As if the writing itself – like Cal – somehow transcended the very concept of gender.
For me, the story’s gender play nestles in poignant details–the unexamined mention that Uncle Pete’s suspect chiropractic practice in a 1959 Detroit wasn’t for clients “to free up their kundalini,” that the narrator’s grandfather chooses Sappho’s glyconic poetry to translate for decades.
Less playfully, the narrator observes restrictive male desire:
Jerome was sliding and climbing on top of me and it felt like it had the night before, like a crushing weight. So do boys and men announce their intentions. They cover you like a sarcophagus lid. And call it love.
Eugenides channels earlier, Italian postmodernism to write an epic novel that undercuts the epic, grandiose authorial fashion of recent years. Middlesex is, at moments, a heartbreaking work of staggering genius because the reader watches as grandparents Lefty and Desdemona create their genealogical fictions (as the narrator “dutifully [oozes] feminine glue”).
Piscine metaphors stream through the text, schooling Callie/Cal in gender assertion–key scenes include bathing suits, sea anemones in locker rooms, battles between gravity and bodies of water, faked menstrual cycles marked by catacomb fish symbols on a calendar.
While the protagonist’s childhood years are charted by a procession of family Cadillacs (the ‘boys & toys’ model), the novel scolds Dr. Luce (and by extension, the reader) for wanting to read straight toward one event in Callie’s life without the greater familial context.
The future is in bed in Schöneberg, but that’s not the end of the book. There must be a return to the matriarchal line first, a presentation of self in a book about self-presentation. The scratchy intercoms in the Middlesex house without walls reconnect mother and child: outmoded technology delivers comic relief.
And harkening back to the reverberating rustles of her silkworm chorus, the reader joins the vindicated Desdemona in the last spoken word of the text, as she looks at Cal and says, “Bravo.”
View all my GoodReads reviews.
Related posts:
- kthread reviews: which brings me to you
- kthread reads: the wonder spot
- kthread reads: unaccustomed earth
Leave a Reply
Posted Saturday, December 20th, 2008, 11:50 am * Filed in Books, Cyberfeminism, Design. * Tags: gender, goodreads, kristen, kthread, middlesex, review, taylor. Follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
