Robert Weibezahl

There is a fine tradition of big, burly multi-generational sagas in American literature, but Jeffrey Eugenides' second novel, Middlesex, is probably the only one narrated by an omniscient hermaphrodite. With Dickensian directness, Cal Stephanides gets right to the point in the opening sentence. "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." Not your ordinary opening line, but then Middlesex is anything but ordinary. "It is out there" in the best sense—a wry, unpredictable and ultimately wise book that has much to say about gender identity, family, adolescence and American values. It is funny and poignant and mythical, and very hard to put down.

Cal is baptized Calliope in a Greek Orthodox church on the eastside of Detroit, and for the next 14 years is raised as a girl. The doctor who brings her into the world is a 74-year-old Armenian who came over on the boat with Calliope's grandparents. Not quite the doctor he once was, he fails to notice that this baby has rather unusual genitals. No one notices, in fact, until Calliope hits puberty and starts to figure out that she is not like the other students at the all-girl school she attends. She remains flat-chested and never begins to menstruate. Her hormones are raging, but the object of her passionate affections is not some teenaged boy, but a redheaded classmate.

Just how Calliope ended up a hermaphrodite and what happens when she finds out is the two-directional story this novel tells. It travels back to Bithynios, a village in eastern Turkey, whence her grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty, flee during the 1922 war between the Greeks and the Turks. The two marry aboard the boat to America and keep secret the fact that they are sister and brother. After many generations of cousins marrying cousins in their little village, poor Calliope will bear the brunt of this even closer than normal interbreeding. Desdemona and Lefty end up in Detroit, and their son, Milton, lives out the mid-century American dream as an aspiring clarinetist, World War II vet and successful restaurateur. He marries Tessie, who also happens to be his second cousin. Calliope's genetic fate is sealed.

One of the great achievements of this book is its portrait of Detroit over a period of 75 years. Calliope's grandparents arrive in the midst of Prohibition, and after a very brief stint as a cog in Henry Ford's industrial machine, Lefty turns to bootlegging. Desdemona, who brought an arcane knowledge of silk production with her from Asia Minor, works for a time within the secret confines of an early incarnation of the Nation of Islam. Milton takes the considerable amount of insurance money he collects when his restaurant burns during the 1967 race riots and heads for the tony suburb of Grosse Pointe and a house with the prescient name of Middlesex. It is there, during the polyester '70s, that Calliope will discover she is really a boy.

A visit to New York Hospital, where sexual disorder and gender identity guru Dr. Peter Luce conducts his research, confirms the worst. But while Calliope displays an XY karotype, which means he is biologically a boy, Dr. Luce decides that he should continue life as the girl he has been raised to be. Cal has other ideas, though. She runs away and meets with a few surprising adventures while trying to figure out exactly who she or he is.

Jeffrey Eugenides proved in his first novel, the cult classic The Virgin Suicides, that he understands adolescent angst, and he is adept at conveying Cal's confusion. Many of us had a hard time surviving the obstacles of adolescence without having to deal with the ramifications of a muted fifth chromosome. But despite this added liability, Cal remains remarkably upbeat, levelheaded and precociously wise. She later he is a cool kid, who handles things with more equilibrium than most. It's as if some measure of the ancient wisdom of her Greek forebears has been passed down along with the genetic mutation.

Given his biological makeup, this particular strand of the Stephanides line will end with Cal. But Middlesex does not end with sadness, it ends with a kind of hope that springs from Cal's humor-tempered realization that we humans can get used to just about anything, if we give it a chance.

Robert Weibezahl has worked in the book publishing industry for 20 years as a writer and publicist. He lives in Los Angeles.

Debut Fiction, Fiction

Fiction Debut Fiction

Love’s promise and disappointments

Review by Robert Weibezahl

by Robert Weibezahl

C.E. Morgan’s gossamer debut novel, All the Living, tells a simple story with a graceful, probing style that elevates it far above simplicity. Chronicling a young woman’s self-discovery through the promise of love and the inevitable disappointments that ensue, Morgan’s spare but intense narrative is a poetic meditation that burrows to our most basic human emotions.

Now in her early 20s, Aloma was orphaned young and raised by an aunt and uncle before boarding at a settlement school in rural Kentucky. A raw piano prodigy, she has stayed on at the school to teach. Orren, a local farmer just a few years her senior, represents the possibility of something more. As the novel opens, Aloma arrives to take up residence with Orren on the hardscrabble tobacco farm he has inherited after the tragic death of his mother and brother.

Although Aloma and Orren share a visceral love spurred by an undeniable sexual hunger, they are ill prepared for the pragmatic give-and-take of domesticity. Orren is buried deep within his grief, wholly immersing himself in the Sisyphean effort to keep the farm going on his own. Aloma encounters small frustrations—not least of all, the discovery that the neglected family piano Orren lured her with is out of tune and unplayable—along with new feelings of loneliness and inadequacy. At Orren’s suggestion, she seeks a job as the piano player at a nearby church. There she begins an awkward friendship with its preacher, Bell, guarding the fact that she is “living in sin.” Over the course of one drought-stricken summer, Aloma struggles with Orren’s brooding belligerence and her unexplored feelings for Bell—a struggle that will culminate in an unavoidably imperfect choice.

While Morgan’s publisher rightly compares her to Marilynne Robinson and Annie Proulx, a more apt equation might be Annie Dillard, for this talented young writer can take a reader’s breath away with her clear, precise depiction of the natural world. In this elegant, impressive debut, Morgan deftly traverses the jagged fissures of love and seeks to locate the primal bonds between the human soul and the world it inhabits.

Rebecca Mead

Interview by Robert Weibezahl

by Robert Weibezahl

In her second book, My Life in Middlemarch, New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead offers a thoughtful examination of the book that has turned out to be a touchstone of her life.

What inspired you to write this book?
I decided I wanted to write about something I loved. The last book I wrote, One Perfect Day was a journalistic exposé of the wedding industry. The business of weddings had engaged me because it seemed so alien, but reporting on it meant spending a lot of time immersed in a world that—not to put too fine a point on it—horrified me. After that experience, I thought if I were going to ever spend several years of my life immersed in another world, I wanted it to be one that would delight and excite me. George Eliot had long fascinated me, and her greatest novel, Middlemarch, was one I returned to again and again. So beginning the research that would eventually turn into My Life in Middlemarch—the slow re-reading of Eliot’s books, and the travel to sites of her life—was a way to recover the joy and the pleasure of reading. It was a glorious opportunity to stop and think about why Middlemarch is so great, and why it meant so much to me.

"[A]t an early age, I chose Middlemarch and it chose me; and I have lived with it for so long I do not know who I would be without it."

What was your introduction to Middlemarch?
I first read Middlemarch when I was 17, studying to take the specialized entrance exams to Oxford University. I was living in a provincial seaside town in England, and spent a few hours every Sunday at the home of an English teacher, who was tutoring a handful of students from my school. Middlemarch begins with the character of Dorothea Brooke, who is 19, living in a provincial town, and yearning for a more meaningful life. Of course I identified with her completely: I was Dorothea, even if I wasn’t wealthy, eligible and beautiful, as she is. But the book is so much more than the story of one young woman’s quest for meaning and fulfillment. It’s a rich, complex portrait of the interconnected lives of the residents of the town—their aspirations, their failures, their love affairs, their professional ambitions, their moral quandaries, their dreams and their limitations. As I sat in my teacher’s living room—with the book on my lap and my own hopes in my heart—it seemed to me the wisest thing I had ever read. It still seems that way.

Of all the classic 19th-century novels, why is Middlemarch your favorite?
I’m not sure whether one can have—or should admit to having—a “favorite” book, at least once one has reached adulthood. Different books speak to different parts of our selves, and there are lots of other 19th-century novels (and 20th-century novels) that I love. I could tell you that I love Middlemarch above other books because I know of no other novel that gives so complete a portrait of the ordinary residents of an ordinary town. Or I could tell you that George Eliot gives a reader access to the interior lives of her characters as no novelist had done before her. Or I could say that the combination of ironic observation and compassionate insight that characterizes Middlemarch is unmatched by any other author. But it would be truer to say that at an early age, I chose Middlemarch and it chose me; and I have lived with it for so long I do not know who I would be without it.

How many times have you read the novel and at what points in your life?
I’ve not kept to a precise schedule, but I’ve read Middlemarch about every five years or so. The first time I was a teenager, eager to get on with life, and at that point it seemed to be all about being a very young woman eager to get on with life. When I read it in my 20s, stumbling from one misbegotten love affair to another, it seemed to be all about the meaning of marriage, and what true commitment might be. In my 30s, when I was seeking to establish myself seriously as a writer, the story of Tertius Lydgate, the doctor who starts out with high professional ambitions and ends up failing to fulfill them, came to have a much more significant resonance for me. And by the time I was in my early 40s—when I started to think about writing My Life in Middlemarch—the book that had once seemed to be all about the hopes and aspirations of youth now seemed to be all about the resignations of middle age. I’m due for another full re-read; I wonder what it will say to me next time.

What do you think Virginia Woolf meant when she called Middlemarch “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”?
I think Woolf was referring to the way in which the satisfactions offered by Middlemarch—and there are many—are complex ones, much like the satisfactions of life itself. Middlemarch isn’t a romance with a happy ending, or a tragedy with a sad one. Full of hopes for passionate love and intellectual companionship, Dorothea makes a disastrous marriage at the beginning of the book to the dry, pedantic Edward Casaubon. She ends up falling in love with Will Ladislaw, Casaubon’s young cousin, but life with him, Eliot suggests, has its own limitations. There is an atmosphere of melancholy in much of the book, especially its conclusion. A lot of Eliot’s contemporary readers found the book altogether too melancholy. A reader is left wondering about the paths chosen by, or chosen for, the book’s many characters—because, as Eliot writes, “every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.” It probably takes a grown-up to recognize the truth of that.

Middlemarch is so rich it can speak to a reader at any age, and in any circumstances. My book is about the way these different themes have come in and out of focus as the years have passed, and about how much Middlemarch has continued to offer me as my life has changed.

You quote Eliot’s phrase “the common yearning of womanhood” when talking about the novel and, in particular, its heroine, Dorothea Brooke. Would you say this is the central theme of Middlemarch—and of your book as well?
I think it’s certainly a central theme of Middlemarch: Dorothea aspires to live a more meaningful, valuable and helpful life than the one she seems destined for by virtue of her birth and class. And it’s the theme that first resonated so much with me, when I was a young, aspiring person myself. But Middlemarch is so rich and intricate that it has many themes of equal importance, certainly not all of them about being a woman, young or otherwise. In characterizing Lydgate and Ladislaw, Eliot offers different iterations on the problem of how to be a worthy man. In the story of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth, the mayor’s son and a land agent’s daughter, she examines the foundations for a good marriage, and the growth in character that love can prompt. In the character of Nicholas Bulstrode, the corrupt banker, Eliot analyses questions of moral obligation and self-deception. Middlemarch is so rich it can speak to a reader at any age, and in any circumstances. My book is about the way these different themes have come in and out of focus as the years have passed, and about how much Middlemarch has continued to offer me as my life has changed.

How has your relationship with Middlemarch changed over the years?
It has changed in surprising and rewarding ways. In my late 30s I become a stepmother to three sons, and so now when I read Eliot’s depictions of Ladislaw, Lydgate and Fred Vincy as they stumble on their sometimes-hapless ways to maturity, I do so in light of the three young men who came into my life as boys, with all their own dramas and triumphs.

Another surprise has been the evolution in the way I read the love story of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth. When I was young, I had more or less no interest in their boy-and-girl-next-door love affair, because I wanted much more exotic romantic adventures for myself. But after many years and many love affairs of my own, I have come to regard early-dawning, long-lived love with something approaching awe. Fred and Mary’s story has taught me to look differently at the marriage of my own parents, who met when they were 15, married at 21, and who stayed married for 60 years, until my father’s death, which happened when I was halfway through writing My Life in Middlemarch. I thought about my parents a lot while I was writing it; the book is dedicated to them, and their influence is on every page.

How has living in New York for the past 20 years influenced your experience of reading the book?
It’s hard to say, since I don’t know how I would have read Middlemarch had I remained living in England. But I’ve certainly discovered there is nothing uniquely British about the desiccated scholar Edward Casaubon, or the dilettantish, passionate Will Ladislaw, male types of which, it turns out, there is no shortage in the United States! Writing the book was, in a way, a means for me to reckon with my identity and my heritage as an Englishperson, albeit an Englishperson who is self-confessedly Americanized in many ways. It was a way of looking back at where I had come from, and how it had made me—and of thinking about where I might go, and what I might do, next.

The human traits of desire, hypocrisy, nobility, weakness and sympathy that Eliot illustrates, with such subtlety and humanity and humor and insight, can be just as easily found in my neighborhood in 21st-century Brooklyn as in a 19th-century English town.

Surprisingly, you found a lot of primary research sources in the States—particularly at the New York Public Library and Yale. Do you happen to know how this trove of Eliot-related material landed on this side of the pond?
Yale University acquired a significant cache of letters written by George Eliot in the early 1930s, and the university added to that collection over the decades, so that now it holds more than 800 letters, as well as journals, notebooks,and other documents: a wonderful treasure trove. Eliot’s letters have been edited by her great biographer, Gordon S. Haight; so I didn’t need to read most of those in manuscript. But I did go to Yale to read the letters written by one of her three stepsons, Thornton Lewes, about whom I write at some length. He was a marvelous character and, incidentally, a very talented writer. (Had he not died tragically young, at 25, he might have gone on to write the best memoir of George Eliot we would ever have had.)

What I didn’t know before I started researching my book was that a notebook George Eliot had been using in the very years during which she wrote Middlemarch ended up in the collection of the New York Public Library, only a few steps from the offices of The New Yorker, where I work. Going to the rare-books reading room, calling that notebook up and getting to touch and turn the pages that Eliot had touched and turned was thrilling. I felt an almost supernatural connection—not to her, exactly, but to her home in London. I felt as if I had been transported, as if I could see and sense the parlor of the Priory, with its musty fireplace and its heavy drapery. It sounds corny—or like I’m making it up—but it’s completely true.

Middlemarch seems the quintessential novel of life in Victorian England. Why do you think it still speaks to readers today?
Middlemarch in some ways is a quintessentially English novel: It’s set in a deliberately average provincial town and is concerned with the customs and practices of 19th-century English life. There’s even a whole political subplot concerning the Reform Act of 1832, the background of which isn’t exactly common knowledge among typical American readers (or for that matter, among typical British ones). But outdated dress codes and superannuated modes of transportation aside, the town of Middlemarch is everywhere. The human traits of desire, hypocrisy, nobility, weakness and sympathy that Eliot illustrates, with such subtlety and humanity and humor and insight, can be just as easily found in my neighborhood in 21st-century Brooklyn as in a 19th-century English town. She makes Middlemarchers of us all.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE
Read our review of My Life in Middlemarch.

In her second book, My Life in Middlemarch, New Yorker staff writer Rebecca Mead offers a thoughtful examination of the book that has turned out to be a touchstone of her life. We caught up with Mead to ask her a few questions about this personal look at a beloved classic.