August 2005: Middlesex (Eugenides)

Post date: Jan 07, 2010 6:29:23 PM

All the readers gathered at Nancy's on August 25, 2005 were glad we'd read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. We pondered the title, which evoked for several of us Middlemarch, a British town, or a New Jersey county and which is almost trite in its double entendre. Usually when everyone likes a book, the discussion can be brief, but we enjoyed the tangents that arose out of individual's observations, such as that it is an immigrant story, a multi-generational story, and explores the cultural anomie at a different angle from some of the other immigrant stories we read earlier this year.

We enjoyed having a biologist in our midst for some of the scientific questions related to the book's narrator and main character, Calliope or Cal. Conversation touched on the subtle differences between sex and gender (sometimes propriety, sometimes political) and society's need to know whether a baby is a boy or a girl and the different ways even strangers interact with an infant or child based on presumed gender. Most of us felt that the author did capture the adolescent girl experience, that much of what we read resonated with our memories of being young girls, and yet there seemed some premonition that something was different for Callie. We noted that we continued to refer to Cal as "she", possibly because that's how we had known the character for most of the book, though in the end Cal is living as an adult male.

Related to Callie's barbershop experience and the importance of hair to her (and his) cultural gender identity, Catherine showed up for our meeting with a shaved head and anecdotes about how dramatically people react to changes in other people's appearance, and how differently people respond to long blond hair vs. nearly bald head.

Inevitably topics meandered away from the book, and the whole group lingered over topics of education, Gertrude Stein and the Japanese emperor as marine biologists in Woods' Hole, travel, and personal histories. Thanks to Nancy for hosting!