To explain his present, Cal delves deeply into his past, which includes his incestuous grandparents’ emigration to Detroit from That is more or less the book’s plot, but the thing that makes Middlesex special is that, like most life stories, Cal’s doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Those suspicions are confirmed when he develops a powerful attraction to a female classmate, whom he refers to only as the “Obscure Object.” The relationship eventually leads Cal to discover his true identity, and sets him on a whole new path. But as Callie gets older, his voyage into puberty diverges sharply from the other girls he knows, and he begins to suspect, subconsciously at first, that something is different about him. Into a Greek-American family, “Callie", as he is first known, seems like a girl to everyone – parents, his half-blind, old-fashioned doctor and even the other kids at school. The narrator and protagonist of Middlesex is Cal, a hermaphrodite raised as girl who later finds something resembling happiness as a man. The genius of Middlesex is that it takes a main character who is something other than “normal” and makes that character achingly, recognizably human. It isn’t even that Middlesex is the rare novel set in Detroit that captures that city’s danger and sad beauty at the same time. It isn’t in his precise use of language to evoke feelings of poignancy and amusement, often in the same sentence. The genius of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex isn’t in its seamless melding of three generational story strands into a captivating whole.
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