The Red Book Club

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April takes us to Mary's and we'll be continuing our reading of Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides and discussing it on Sunday the 30th, 7pm.

The genius of Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex isn't in its seamless melding of three generational story strands into a captivating whole. It isn't in his precise use of language to evoke feelings of poignancy and amusement, often in the same sentence. 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.

The genius of Middlesex is that it takes a main character who is something other than "normal" and makes that character achingly, recognizably human. The narrator and protagonist of Middlesex is Cal, a hermaphrodite raised as girl who later finds something resembling happiness as a man. Born Calliope Helen Stephanides 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. 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. more...

Jeffrey Eugenides has created a singular impression for someone who has published one novel in his whole career -- one novel in the last decade, and very few interviews all the while. He lives in Germany with his family, writes the occasional book review or pop music essay; and nearly ten years after publishing his buzzed-about debut novel The Virgin Suicides, he gets around to offering a second: Middlesex. From the interest surrounding this dilatory sophomore effort, you'd think he'd been in the public eye all along.

His continued cultural currency was doubtless sustained by the 1999 release of Sofia Coppola's stylishly hazy adaptation of The Virgin Suicides; but what else can account for it? His stories, that's what. Eugenides has that Nabokovian gift for combining the prurient with the tragic. The Virgin Suicides was a relatively brief, dreamlike narrative about five sisters in suburban Michigan in the early '70s, all of whom killed themselves. It offers a speedball of irresistible American themes: coming of age in suburbia, family dysfunction, suicide and sex. more...