Middlesex
Cal Stephanides, born intersex to a Greek-American family in Detroit, narrates three generations of genetic and cultural inheritance. Eugenides published it in 2002 and won the Pulitzer. The novel treats identity as biological fact and social construction simultaneously, without choosing sides. Its command of multigenerational scope recalls Garcia Marquez.
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 case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
