Imagine the following mundane scene: A woman stands over a
pile of freshly done pile of laundry, sorting. Skirts all go on
hangers in the closet, jeans all go in the bottom drawer. Then
she finds a pair of denim koolats. Do they go in the drawer, or
in the closet? Maybe you’ve experienced this phenomenon.
Humans love to organize, separating “all this” into
“this” or “that.” The problem is once you
divide “this and that,” the “other thing”
always seems to emerge, challenging our sense of order and
control and exposing the arbitrary, unnatural nature of
compartmentalization.
Gender is no different. As small children, we learned to
distinguish between boys and girls, with differing toys, clothes,
bathrooms, sport’s teams, and so forth. But what about
people who fall in between? The recent media maelstrom over South
African runner, Caster Semenya is a true life example of a person
who was raised as female but whose actual biological condition may be intersex, according to reports allegedly leaked by some one within the IAAF to the Australian media.* In Jeffrey Eugenides’ Pulitzer Prize winning novel (2003), Middlesex,
the saga’s eventual protagonist, Calliope Stephanides, was
born with 5-alpha-reductase deficiency, or 5-ARD, a condition
which decreases the level of testosterone to such a degree as it
can mask the individual’s maleness. 5-ARD, and the
author’s intensive research into its intricacies, is
Middlesex’s “hook,” the one line description
that gets the reader interested.
However, there is more to the story than Calliope, who is raised
as “Callie,” and becomes “Cal,” the
narrator of a limited yet overreaching omniscience. Cal, as an
adult, has a psychic recollection of his family’s exodus
from Greece during the brutal invasion of the Turks. The first
arch and crescendo of this saga begins in a rural village named
Bithynios, in the summer of 1922, with a young Desdemona
Stephanides high on Mount Olympus, in her silk cocoonery
surrounded by twenty thousand silkworms, all spinning. Her heart
skips a beat. She has a prescient sensation that something is
wrong; that she is somehow sick on the inside.
She has already lost her parents, who were murdered by invading
Turks. But the worst is yet to come; the retreat of the Greek
army setting fire to everything in their path to destroy it
before the Turks could take it, a disgraceful naval retreat led
by General Hajienestes, who was suffering from mental illness,
and the apathy of the Allied forces who sat by idly while
civilians including women and children were mutilated and
massacred.
Amidst the backdrop of this disintegration of civilization,
Desdemona and her brother Lefty break the incest taboo and become
lovers. It seems repugnant and yet is presented as a reaction to
the madness around them. As the hillside burns, the tormented
lovers flee with only what they carry. They are saved only by the kindness of a
stranger, Dr. Phlibosian, an Armenian. He lends Lefty some money
which he uses to buy bread --their first food in three days-- and
win a massive amount of money, by gambling in a bar, in order to
pay for sea passage to the United States for himself and Desdemona. Once onboard, Lefty
and Desdemona pretend they have never met before, and act out a
fake "courtship" in which they fool the passengers into thinking
that they are two young strangers falling in love. The Captain
marries them aboard the ship, and they arrive in America knowing
only a Detroit cousin, Sourmelina, who has a secret of her own:
Although she lives like a normal, married woman, she is actually
a lesbian. So Lefty lets Sourmelina in on the fact that he has
married his sister, but nobody else in America ever finds out,
until Desdemona, now an old lady, confesses it to her grandson,
Cal, and the family excuses her comments as symptomatic of
senility.
Sourmelina's husband is, in this tale of unusual characters,
arguably the most far-fetched. His name is Jimmy Zizmo and he has
some shady connections, as well as mistrusting every one,
especially his wife. It's not Jimmy's gangster persona or even
his violent death as he plunges into an ice cold lake -- but his
relationship to W.D. Fard, a self-proclaimed supreme being who
prophesizes about the "Tricknology" of the white man to his
Nation of Islam followers that is completely unexpected.
Jimmy is in the story long enough to father a daughter, Tessie.
Desdemona and Lefty have a child, too, a boy named Milton. Only
because Milton and Tessie, who are cousins, grow up and marry
each other, does the recessive gene which causes 5-ARD appear in
Callie. Callie's story develops after the story of Tessie and
Milton and their ascendency toward the American Dream as Milton
builds the Hercules Hotdog empire one hot dog stand at a time.
How Callie slowly discovers that she is actually a he, and the
medical and psychological expert's mishandling of the situation,
comprise the remainder of this intense novel, with its
capriciously twisting and turning plot, until we are breathlessly
brought back to Cal's present day situation as a foreign
diplomatic officer.
Like many Pulitzer Prize winning authors, Jeffrey Eugenides has
ties to Hollywood. His previous novel, The Virgin Suicides,
became a Sofia Coppola film starring James Woods, Kathleen
Turner, Kirsten Dunst and Josh Harnett in 1999. His story "The
Baster" has been turned into another movie, currently in
post-production and starring Jennifer Aniston; the film is said
to be opening in 2010 under a new title.
© 2010, Moira Cue for The Hollywood Sentinel, All rights
reserved.