FICTION: Writing a successful second novel is never going to be easy for for Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex is an engaging and colourful performance which reiterates the emergence of a textured original, writes Eileen Battersby
Publishers do make large claims; it is part of the business of selling books. But, for once, the much-used phrase "eagerly awaited" is not only justified, it is true. Since the publication of his outstanding 1993 début, The Virgin Suicides, an evocative lament juxtaposing horror and comedy, Jeffrey Eugenides has been a writer whose next step was kept under scrutiny. Readers did anticipate his next work.
Admittedly, it took some waiting. Huge expectations greeted the news that, after nine years, his second novel was ready. Middlesex is big; funny, stylish, sad, determinedly unlike The Virgin Suicides and, most importantly, true to his gifts - he is a very fine writer.
A narrator sets out to tell the story of his life or, more accurately, how he got to where he is, aged 41, when his account begins. Clearly, Middlesex is never going to be the standard tale of growing up in small-town USA: "I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974." As with The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides candidly and daringly sets out his tale in the opening sentence.
Even more interestingly, he allows Cal, his narrator and central character, full access to the facts. Whereas, in the earlier book, the collective narrative voice comprises a chorus of now middle-aged men recalling the voyeuristic fascination five girl suicides held for them as sexually aroused boys, Cal is an insider, both case history and observer.
Middlesex, a Detroit suburb, is the physical setting for much of the new novel; it also aptly describes the inter-sexual zone inhabited by Callie, later Cal. Tone is vital to Eugenides; he uses it with the skill of a musician. His prose combines energy and grace, comic one-liners within formal language. The success of the new novel rests on its wryly likeable narrative voice, often bewildered but never angry. Cal is the victim of genetics, most specifically a mutation of the fifth chromosome, the condition that creates a hermaphrodite. Cal's plight - sexual statelessness - has been predestined by the love that caused his orphaned grandparents to marry each other when young, despite the taboo complication posed by their being brother and sister.
This could have been a book about science and well-documented abnormality. Instead, it is essentially a comic domestic saga sustained by sharp characterisation, good dialogue, pace and an ease of touch. Eugenides ensures that it is a book about many things. It is Cal's story, but it is also a tale about emigrants leaving their ransacked Greek village within a hostile Turkey and arriving in the US.
It is a study of assimilation which also keeps one eye on the shadow of the Old World and its ways. The book is also about the US throughout the 20th century, from the Wall Street Crash, to prohibition, to the Detroit race riots - here vividly recreated - to Watergate. The Greek element, particularly births, deaths, funerals and loud lamentation, is well-represented by the theatrical Desdemona, the grandmother within whom Cal's odyssey begins.
Yet, ironically, the weakest elements are the early chapters recalling the escape of the grandparents from the Old World and their subsequent sea voyage to the New. It is here, and also in a couple of minor later sequences, that the novel seems closer to John Irving or T. Coraghessan Boyle than it does to the Eugenides of The Virgin Suicides.
For all the comedy and one-liners, as well as the passage of the characters through life and in some cases, two cultures - that of the Greek village and the US suburb - Middlesex is essentially about flight. Cal is not the only character on the run; several others are also on the run from their histories, their mistakes and themselves.
While lacking the sinister glamour, mystery and incantatory fatalism of The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex does at times approach a similar sense of elegy.
The lament, though, is more about the very real trials of adolescence than the wish to drift out of life shared by the five Lisbon sisters. Once Cal's immediate story takes over, the novel settles.
The writing is fluent throughout, with several good setpieces, including a wonderful sequence featuring Milton, Cal's father, and his particular style of home movie-making:
The brightness of those films gives them the quality of Gestapo interrogation. Holding up our presents, we all cringe, as though caught with contraband. Aside from their blinding brightness, there was another odd thing about Milton's home movies: like Hitchcock, he always appeared in them. The only way to check the amount of film left in the camera was by reading the counter inside the lens. In the middle of Christmas scenes or birthday parties there always came a moment when Milton's eye would fill the screen.
Throughout the novel, Cal reveals an interest in life itself, and other people. The dilemma of establishing an identity is a powerful theme, as is the notion of sexual choice, but it never takes over. Middlesex succeeds through its narrative voice. Eugenides shows himself to be a clever technician as well as an assured stylist and master of tone. No, following his first novel was never going to be easy, but this engaging and colourful performance reiterates the emergence of a textured original.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Middlesex. By Jeffrey Eugenides. Bloomsbury, 529pp. £16.99