Teen Hermaphrodites: It's All Greek to Me

Wouldn’t it be cool to be Greek? I think it would. Of course, my knowledge of Greek culture is pretty limited, and can actually be summarized in the following 3 points:
1.Gyros taste pretty good.
2. "Baklava" is fun to say.
3. I like the Pirate’s Pizza commercial where the little old man dances around his restaurant singing, "I’m saying ‘Opa’ to my pizza!" in a quavery voice.

Okay, so I don’t actually know that much about being Greek. Still, it has an exotic flavor: olive oil, mythology, hermaphroditism born of village inbreeding. What, you don’t think "hermaphrodite" when you think "Greece"? Then you need to read Middlesex, my friend.

Calliope Helen Stephanides has no reason to suspect she’s anything but an ordinary teenage girl. True, she hasn’t started her period or begun to develop by age 14, but that’s not unheard of. True, her childhood beauty has given way to an oddly masculine profile and a rather boyish body structure, but the teens are an awkward stage for most people. As it happens, though, Calliope’s teenage years are going to be just a wee bit different from yours and mine. Flash back to Smyrna, where "Lefty" and Desdemona Stephanides, orphaned brother and sister, live alone, supporting themselves with a small silkworm farm. Alas, Lefty, young and feckless, is drifting into trouble – combing his hair with Brylcreem, singing American songs, spending his nights gambling in bars in the company of shady ladies (recurring themes in the succeeding generations of Stephanides). Desdemona decides that finding Lefty a wife is the surest way to settle him down, not realizing that he only has eyes for her. Long story short, they emigrate to America to start over as husband and wife; little do they know that they’ve got a stowaway on board, a genetic predisposition toward hermaphroditism lurking in their DNA. Desdemona is terrified of giving birth to a monster, but her children seem normal enough; still, when her son Milton starts making eyes at her cousin’s daughter Tessie, the genetic intertwining continues, to be brought to fruition in their child Calliope. Like a Greek tragedy, the act of incest, jam-packed with hubris, brings down the wrath of the gods. Suddenly, Calliope, raised as a girl, is faced with fundamental questions about who – and what – she is. Sometimes, though, a curse can also be a gift; if you’re not what you thought you were, then you’re free to be anything you want to be.

I don’t know how Greek Eugenides is, but he certainly has a gift for capturing the raw, hypersensitive angst of suburban American teens, circa the 1970s (more successfully done in The Virgin Suicides). Calliope is a wry, wisecracking narrator, presenting her story as a modern-day myth with tongue fixed firmly in cheek. I was less than enraptured by the Smyrna part of the story; the brother-on-sister incest was not as gratifyingly sordid as I’d hoped, and the history lessons didn’t do much for me, either. Eugenides’ deft rendering of the sexual explorations and discoveries of youth is where the story really hits its stride: everyone experiences a transformation in young adulthood as they learn to think of themselves as sexual beings and acknowledge their desires, and it’s this that allows us to share in Calliope’s fears and uncertainties on the path to growing up. As meaty and substantial as a gyro, as delicately layered as baklava, Middlesex is a clever and entertaining tale of identity, self-invention, and desire.