I’m not sure how to write, what to say. I’ve been thinking about the book all week. I’ve started several blog posts—then scrapped them when they failed to communicate my thoughts satisfactorily. I could sum up my message with three words: Read the book—but that wouldn’t relieve the duty I feel toward my readers. The basis is something I’ve discussed with a literature professor many times—how can a fiction carry any truth at all, and why are the most profound truths found within their pages?
I started Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, several weeks ago at the suggestion of said literature professor. I was at first appalled, then entranced, by the story. I couldn’t devote much time to it because of more pressing college obligations so it languished on my ipod reader during reading and finals weeks. Then I lost the ipod for a month (it was in a seldom-used backpack pocket) and I was occupied with demands vacations invariably bring. I finished the book after I found an audio version to accompany me during my solo cross-country drive back to Arizona.
Middlesex is a long story. It contains thorough explanations and ample background by going back several generations to life in Greek Turkey. It tells of the tensions and uncertainties of immigration, practices and rituals that had to be reexamined in the new land, and the resignation and commitment to the new culture so necessary for immigrants—then and now—to succeed in their new surroundings. But this is only a primer, a foretaste of the real story.
The first irony appears when the immigrants readily disregard their rich heritage yet hold their children rigidly to their own ideals—ideals so strong that parents fail to comprehend the possibility that things could be different, ideals so strong that children refuse to entertain the possibility of reconciliation with parents. In this manner, life moves on—parents unable to see any deviation in their children's lives, children unable to level with parents. When Calliope discovers privately that she is not the girl her parents raised her as, and after her parents are incapable of reacting to facts, she runs away from home to live as the boy she always was. Now Cal instead of Calli, he returns home later to find (conveniently for the author, perhaps?) his father dead, and his mother and brother as he left them. Much is written about this time of reconciliation but I’ll leave that part unspoiled, leaving buried wisdom to be uncovered by readers of the story as was surely intended by the author.
Although Middlesex is a rich trope of the dilemma faced by immigrants to new worlds, I find it an apt metaphor of the quandary every parent must face when expectations are defeated, ideals are unrealized, and the unthinkable becomes reality. Yet it goes beyond parents, to all people; changes are happening all around us, how will we respond?
Isabel Wilkerson writes in The Warmth of Other Suns on the topic of immigration, “Was it a braver thing to stay, or was it a braver thing to go?” I don’t think this question has an answer, but it frames the dissonance that each need be prepared to confront. Middlesex is an extraordinary tale of expectations, change, and reconciliation. It allows momentary contact with—as all great fictions do—the irrefutable and immovable elements in the world around us that we call truth.