t's been nine years since Jeffrey Eugenides's first novel, The Virgin Suicides, which you might remember for its comic-lyrical descriptions of suburban Michigan, its first-person-plural choral narration, or its intimate recollection of teenage sexual longing. For me, it's the goofy parts that linger: Grosse Pointe girls and boys playing cheesy records to each other over the phone and Eugenides quoting whole stanzas of lyrics from campy '70s bands. When I read that book I thought: Here's a confident writer, screaming with talent and literary ambition, who's actually out to entertain.
     Almost a decade later comes Middlesex. Eugenides's ambition has grown grander, and his virtuosity is in full flower — he can do love scenes (heterosexual, homosexual, connubial, flirtatious, passionate, incestuous, and gross), war scenes (at home and abroad), family scenes (in several decades of American life), locker-room scenes (high school girls, strip club freaks), fight scenes, car chases, field hockey games, meditations on the nature of gender identity; he can even dramatize medical discourse on the sexual development of the fetus (pay attention and you might learn something) — but his looseness remains, along with his gift for a good time. The book is a five-hundred-page dazzler, fireworks in every paragraph, but Eugenides is rare among the authors to whom he is likely to be compared — Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace, five-hundred page dazzlers both — in that he does not suffer from their tendency towards self-conscious self-flagellation. He is telling a story and he does not aspire to be difficult. Bennett Cerf once compiled an anthology called Reading for Pleasure, and much of Middlesex could have made its way into that. This is highbrow entertainment, moving, wise, thoughtful, but, above all, fun.
     I first heard Middlesex described as a novel about a hermaphrodite, which is true in a sort of ballpark way and no doubt useful for booksellers; that much is supposed to tell you that the book is daring, original, and shocking. But the novel's true accomplishment doesn't lie in its subject matter but in its execution. (An aside for those keeping count: Matthew Sharpe's Nothing Is Terrible appeared just a few years ago, another man's original, accomplished, daring novel about a hermaphrodite in the suburban '70s, but that book cut a different, more Barthelme-esque, figure.) Middlesex is a novel of broad scope: it's multigenerational, beginning in Greece in the 1920s and ending fifty-odd years later in suburban Detroit. In long stretches , the narrative involves the life of Calliope Stephanides — a genetic female who grows up male — but in its entirety the novel is something larger: the history of the incestuous Stephanides family, from the refugee-immigrant couple Lefty and Desdemona (brother and sister, and Calliope's grandparents), to assimilators Milton and Tessie (cousins, and her parents), to Callie, later known as Cal. It's a novel of American identity, about being two things at once (sister-wife, Greek-American, boy-girl), about where you come from and where you're going, about trying to figure out who you are and having the answer always turn out to be ambiguous. Think Midnight's Children for Hellenic Grosse Point.
     And it is very funny. Here is Calliope on faking menstruation: "I did cramps the way Meryl Streep does accents." Or, on the facing page, her Uncle Pete on Watergate: "Even from a chiropractic standpoint, Nixon is a questionable character." Here is part of the set piece that anchors the first third of the novel: the burning of Smyrna, the Turks invading, and Lefty and Desdemona on the run.

The smell of things burning that aren't meant to burn wafts across the city: shoe polish, rat poison, toothpaste, piano strings, hernia trusses, baby cribs, Indian clubs. And hair and skin. By this time, hair and skin. On the quay, Lefty and Desdemona stand up along with everyone else, with people too stunned to react, or still half-asleep, or sick with typhus and cholera, or exhausted beyond caring. And then suddenly, all the fires on the hillside form one great wall of fire stretching across the city and — it's inevitable now — start moving towards them.

     Eugenides can be very delicate; he is never sensational in his description of Calliope's body. Here is the protagonist's description of those sexual part(s), a description which appears, it should be noted, very discreetly and some four hundred pages into the book:

What I saw looking down at myself was only the dark badge of puberty. When I touched the crocus it expanded, swelling until with a kind of pop it slid free of the pouch it was in. It poked its head up into the air. Not too far though. No more than an inch past the tree line.

     Fireworks, everywhere.
     The book falls, more or less, into two halves. In the first, we get the story of Calliope's family coming into America — Ellis Island, the roaring twenties, World War II, the rise of Black Muslims. In the second, we get the story of the narrator coming into her (and then his) own — birth, baptism, childhood, confused adolescence marked by gender change. These two parts overlap — Callie is there for the Detroit riots of 1967, for Nixon, for the Turkish invasion of Cyprus — but they have their distinct tones. The historical stuff is flashy, exuberant, and wild. The personal narrative is often more contemplative and sorrowful; the anguish of a junior-high school hermaphrodite is done with particular poignance.
     Some nit-picker, I suppose, could read the book as inconsistent, split in two, and argue that, despite the author's fine workmanship and smooth transitions, the seams show and that Middlesex is two novels in one. I'd argue the novel's hybrid nature is appropriate to its theme — if Middlesex operated on just one track, it wouldn't be true to itself or to the contradictions of its characters.

Middlesex by Gabriel Brownstein The epic Middlesex is an unambiguous success.