Middlesex

⚖The case for it

Cal narrates his own life with a warmth that carries a subject most books would handle at arm’s length, and readers call him “such a charismatic and loveable narrator.” Eugenides moves like a camera: “the narrative zoomed in and out, there were montages,” decades crossed in a paragraph without ever leaving first person. The family history has its own pull, a Greek village, Smyrna burning, Detroit, Prohibition, the 1967 riot, which readers describe as “mythic; the stuff from the Gods.” A recessive gene travels five generations before it surfaces, holding the epic together. And it is funny. “I literally lol’d several times” recurs across reviews of a book about a body.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Cal’s own adolescence does not arrive until somewhere past page 250 of 529, which is why readers say the book is “really more a family saga than about Cal.” “Pick one, tell it,” one reviewer instructs. Secondary characters exist to move the plot along, and Cal’s brother goes the whole novel with no name but Chapter Eleven. The historical stretches read to detractors as a “mashup of immigrant dramas,” the flourishes staged to display the author’s wit rather than serve anyone in the book. Intersex readers object to the frame itself, a condition made the payoff of an incestuous marriage, and call the result “theater of some cis man’s morbid curiosity.” The vocabulary and the strict he-or-she telling have dated.

— the honest librarian

11h

honest hours

16

sittings