Before Cal dons male garb, allows his facial whiskers to flourish and takes the name Cal, the narrator is named Calliope-the muse of epic poetry (This paragraph as published has been corrected in this text).Įugenides wants to bust out of the private angst closet and stride the world stage, brandishing Big Themes. `Middlesex,' on the other hand, wants to be a Homeric epic.
"The Virgin Suicides" is a lyric poem of a novel. The central events occur in one year during the early 1970s, and most of the characters remain in their Michigan hometown. We know the males through their obsession, but they don't know themselves, so finally everyone's behavior is a muddle and mystery. The girls, seen through the boys' drool-soaked scrim, might as well be inscrutable cattle alternately grazing and throwing themselves against barbed wire, for all the proximity we get to their thoughts and concerns. In "The Virgin Suicides," we get gobs of physical detail but few psychological insights. What he's not that good at is making the stories deliver emotional power or add up to much. It's easy to get caught up in his narrators' passionate need to tell their tales. These elements go a long way in making him a compelling storyteller. He loves building suspense, delaying revelation, wondering without knowing. He loves the genealogies of everything, the snaking path from umbilicus to ash heap of cultures as well as individuals. He loves speculating about cause and effect. He loves language, how things look, the associations conjured by sensation. And again, riddling the book's upright strains of gender deconstruction is the unmistakable smell of inauthenticity,Įugenides writes lush sentences.
Again he invents an original narrator, this time a hermaphrodite who is raised as a female and is living as a male at the time the story is told. In his second novel, "Middlesex," Eugenides again pays lip service to the notion that sex roles are constructed by social norms, not forged by genitalia and chromosomes-the "animals with identical skins" pitch. the singed smell of drilled teeth." We hear nothing about the smell of male bodies. His "we" drools sadistically over the girls' entrapment and suffering, and maniacally catalogs the stinks of their body parts, real and imagined, comparing "trapped beaver" to the dead fish flies that plague the suburban neighborhood in which the novel is set and also to "bad breath, cheese, milk, tongue film. Swift, with his poems to Stella who's depicted defecating and farting, looks like an amateur in the sexual disgust department next to Eugenides. It's an ode to male hormonal longing and the anxiety it kicks up, but make no mistake, ode it is, not satire or anatomy. The novel energetically inspects the way boys differentiate themselves by being not-females. The problem with this passage-and with the novel spun around it-is that it's false.
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