Jeffrey Eugenides' "Middlesex"

This is an interesting book. It is a old-style grand novel across three generations. But it is modern in that it slices and dices the story with flashbacks and flashforwards and multi-perspective writing. Some won't like it because it is a bit complex and the early part of the book is set in the Greek remnants of western Turkey at the time of WWI. But I liked the historical sweep. I especially enjoyed the philosophical asides pondering our fate as humans.

The major premise of the book is a derelict gene that causes hermaphroditism. Funny... you have to read 400 pages before you really get into the details of the condition. So this book is not for the faint-hearted. Similarly, this book is not afraid to spell out scientific detail. I love the blend of fact and fiction, history and narrative.

I'm a sucker for a story and this one is good. It is a little slow getting started, but the good news is that the drama gets more gripping the further into the stories you go. The intial stories of the first generation immigrants in interesting but not gripping. The second generational stories resonate with me because they relate to my parents' generation. The third generation, which deals with Caliope, AKA Cal, and the story of her perigrination from girl to boy was very interesting. Add to this more twists to the plot than you can imagine and it was a real rollercoaster ride for me. Lots of fun.

This is not a great psychological novel. It isn't a great historical novel. It is a grand novel centered around the fascinating biological fact of hermaphroditism. But even this key theme, is really only dealt with in a couple of dozen pages. The material about Zora and Dr. Peter Luce is the only real discussion of the genetics and condition. The material about Caolipe is discrete and indirect. So this isn't really a book about hermaphroditism. It is a historical novel about three generations of an immigrant family that happens to harbour a defective gene.

As I read the material on Dr. Peter Luce I kept thinking of Dr. John Money, the opinionated sex "expert" at John Hopkins, famous for his claim that you could change gender identity by simply raising a child under an assigned sex. Dr. Money ruined a lot of lives. This novel happily avoids the ugly reality of cases that suffered under the hands of a ideologue like Money. If you want to see how ugly this reality can be, read David Reimer's story in the book "As Nature Made Him":


You can watch an eight minute CBC documentary on David Reimer's short life, the deceptions of Dr John Money, and the suffering of David. Notice how his mother found out only after Money did his "experiment" on David that most of the gender re-assigned kids committed suicide. Notice also, that the documentary pointed out the "Dr." John Money's office at John Hopkins University failed to respond to a request by the CBC for an interview. Most academics are proud of their work and eager to have access to the general public, but Money refused. Money died in 2006, but he was eulogized by the scientific society and he never accepted the horrors he had inflicted on other (nor has the scientific society). Here's an NPR piece about Money.