Middlesex

“And let’s not forget where they were dancing, in Bithynios, that mountain village where cousins sometimes married third cousins and everyone was somehow related, so that as they danced, they started holding each other more tightly, stopped joking, and then just danced together, as a man and a woman, in lonely and pressing circumstances, might sometimes do.”

The narrator’s explanation of his grandparents’ love story—brother and sister turned husband and wife—hinges on the circumstances of time and place. His origin story is intimately tied to theirs. Cal offers no judgment due to the war and his grandparents’ losses.

“I’d like to take this opportunity to resuscitate—for purely elegiac reasons and only for a paragraph—that city which disappeared, once and for all, in 1922. Smyrna endures today in a few rebetika songs and a stanza from The Waste Land.”

The narrator describes his grandparents’ flight from the burning city in an epic digression, wherein he lists the qualities and amenities of their ancient home. It signals that this will be an epic story—a device common to Homer’s works—and indicates the emotional cost of forced migration. In addition, the narrator references another epic poem, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, which provides another antecedent for his story. (Tiresias, the man who also lived as a woman for seven years, figures prominently in Eliot’s work.)

“Lefty never discouraged any speculation. He seized the opportunity of transatlantic travel to reinvent himself. He wrapped a ratty blanket over his shoulders like an opera cape. Aware that whatever happened now would become the truth, that whatever he seemed to be would become what he was—already an American, in other words—he waited for Desdemona to come up on deck.”

Central to the novel’s primary theme, Lefty’s ability for reinvention and his resilience in leaving home echoes what Cal does years later. It’s also central to the immigrant experience, as Cal tells it. An American is someone who can remake their identity as circumstances demand and imagination allows.

“Planning is for the world’s great cities, for Paris, London and Rome, for cities dedicated, at some level, to culture. Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had to give way to expediency.”

While the narrator often idealizes the immigrant experience in the US, he’s also frequently critical of the young country. This is one way that he contrasts his heritage—the Greek roots from which he writes—with his present.

“Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it’s my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.”

The generational inheritance at the heart of the story illuminates the themes. While Cal inherits genetics that determine who he is, he also inherits the histories and the experiences of the ancestors whose actions and beliefs led way to his existence. The crux of the novel is the dichotomy between destiny and choice. While Cal is born into his destiny in many ways, he also exercises the ability to ultimately decide his own fate.

“Not long after the Prophet’s disappearance, my grandmother underwent a fairly novel medical procedure. A surgeon made two incisions below her navel. Stretching open the tissue and muscle to expose the circuitry of the fallopian tubes, he tied each in a bow, and there were no more children.”

Desdemona makes the decision to undergo surgery in order not to bear any more children with her husband, Lefty, who is also her brother. This foreshadows how Cal’s genetic inheritance renders him unable to have children. Instead, Cal’s legacy will be the story, Middlesex, that he leaves behind.

“‘I just mean that over in the old country people aren’t too well educated,’ Milton said. ‘They’ll believe whatever stories the priests tell them. Here it’s different. You can go to college and think for yourself.’”

Milton’s perspective highlights the contrast between his immigrant parents and his own American upbringing. It dismisses the traditions of the old world—particularly those of the Greek Orthodox church—and is quickly rebuffed by Father Mike, his rival for Tessie’s affections. Father Mike notes that the storytelling of the church is integral to people’s understanding of who they are and where they come from. Again, the author demonstrates a tension between these two perspectives, while acknowledging both.

“Every Greek drama needs a deus ex machina.”

Again, the narrator overtly refers to his influences from Greek literary history. “Deus ex machina,” or “God in the machine” refers to the ways in which the story is overtaken by the gods—or, in his contemporary terms, destiny—to move a story forward. Milton is called back from his time in World War II, thus enabling his marriage to Tessie and Cal’s eventual birth.

“My eyes, switched on at last, saw the following: a nurse reaching out to take me from the doctor; my mother’s triumphant face, as big as Mount Rushmore, as she watched me heading for my first bath (I said it was impossible, but still I remember it.)”

Again, in following the epic tradition, the narrator introduces himself in medias res: in the middle of things. In this scene, he depicts his own birth and even alludes to remembering it. The focus is now on the journey of the epic hero, or protagonist, who to this point has been recounting the exploits of his ancestors.

“My emotional life accords with designs, too. In the sixties, when Cadillacs were futuristically self-assured, I was also self-confident and forward-looking. In the gas-short seventies, however, when the manufacturer came out with the unfortunate Seville—a car that looked as though it had been rear-ended—I also felt misshapen.”

The narrator is tethered directly to the American experience. The cars that he interacts with provide him with metaphors for his larger life. He’s bound not only to his own family history but also to the history of his adopted homeland and to the larger forces of history in general.

“Middlesex! Did anyone live in a house as strange? As sci-fi? As futuristic and outdated at the same time?”

The house on Middlesex Boulevard represents everything liminal about the narrator’s experience. It exists in between the realistic and the fictional, in between the expected and the traditional, in between the past and the future. It’s the house in which a new kind of hero can be born.

“As far as Desdemona was concerned, death was only another kind of emigration. Instead of sailing from Turkey to America, this time she would be traveling from earth to heaven, where Lefty had already gotten his citizenship and had a place waiting.”

The encapsulation of Desdemona’s experience as an immigrant to the US occurs once her husband dies. She’s abandoned on the shores of a foreign home, while he moves onward. The event also highlights that she has never felt fully at home in the US.

“And so the last thing the hockey ball (coming closer now, unwilling to endure any more exposition)—the last thing the hockey ball symbolized was Time itself, the unstoppability of it, the way we’re chained to our bodies, which are chained to Time.”

The hockey ball becomes a momentary representation of the adolescence that is hurtling toward Cal, destined to change him irrevocably. In addition, the passage acknowledges the narrator’s own winking nod to his storytelling: No more exposition is necessary.

“With the short-order efficiency of Jimmy Papanikolas, she positioned us around the room like food on a grill: in one corner the large woman as pink as a slab of Canadian bacon; down at the bottom Tessie and me, lumped together like home fries; over on the left the bikini-liners, lying sunny side up.”

This is another example of how food serves as a metaphor to categorize the experience and place of the people involved. As Cal and Tessie wait to have their facial hair waxed, a panoply of people, from all corners of the globe, are also waiting in the same place. It’s an expression of solidarity across cultural boundaries, in the same way that food expresses this cohesion.

“If this story is written only for myself, then so be it. But it doesn’t feel that way. I feel you out there, reader. This is the only kind of intimacy I’m comfortable with.”

The narrator, as Cal, breaks the fourth wall, acknowledging his audience’s presence and addressing them directly. This reveals both that he wants his story to be heard because it helps validate his existence, so to speak, and that he feels most comfortable keeping others at a distance. Unveiling who he is requires an act of heroic bravery.

“I prayed for my period to come. I prayed to receive the womanly stigmata.”

As Cal begins to understand that his journey into adolescence is different from those of other girls his age, he turns to the religion his grandparents brought with them. This moment also gestures toward one of the issues with which Cal is grappling: whether biology is destiny. Cal’s decision to remake himself as Cal defies the notion that biology is destiny.

“Forced to choose between his native land and his ancestral one, he didn’t hesitate.”

Cal’s father, Milton, easily sides with the Americans—and their lack of involvement—in the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. The author suggests that part of becoming an American is a rejection of the past.

“I had already left on my voyage. I was sailing across the sea to another country.”

Cal, as the narrator, likens Callie’s journey toward self-discovery and deciding that he is Cal to his grandparents’ experience of immigration. The voyage isn’t merely one of place, of getting to a particular destination, but of deciding personal identity. Desdemona and Lefty left behind one identity—that of sister and brother—to arrive in the US as husband and wife. Cal must undertake a similar passage.

“Like a person with a terminal illness, I was eager to ignore the immediate symptoms, hoping for a last-minute cure.”

The fact that Cal’s situation is medicalized—that his identity becomes symbolic of illness—expresses the ways that gender becomes “dis-eased” and is treated like something to be regulated by the state/laws. His discomfort with how everyone around him begins to describe, codify, and objectify him reflects their own discomfort with a body that does not conform.

“Women prefer the anecdotal, men the deductive. It was impossible to be in Luce’s line of work without falling back on such stereotypes. He knew their limitations. But they were clinically useful.”

Dr. Luce relies on stereotypes to make his recommendation that Cal be surgically altered to conform to the gender of his upbringing. Cal, however, doesn’t accept such stereotypes—in the tradition of his family—and decides to embark upon a different journey.

“I hadn’t gotten old enough yet to realize that living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead.”

Cal recognizes his inheritance in this family story. He doesn’t merely embody his family’s choices but also embodies his own. Nevertheless, he can’t disconnect from the family story that he began with Desdemona and Lefty. He’s both a part of that legacy—a part of the weight of history—and a representative for the future.

“But I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn’t normal. It couldn’t be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone.”

Travel and its consequences reside at the heart of the novel. Travel can reinvent (as in the case of Lefty) or diminish (as in the case of Desdemona). The religious overtones can be traced back to the ancient Greek epics that the author self-consciously follows, where travel usually sees a hero dramatically altered by the end of their journey.

“When you travel like I did, vague about destination and with an open-ended itinerary, a holy-seeming openness takes over your character. It’s the reason the first philosophers were peripatetic. Christ, too.”

Travel and its consequences reside at the heart of the novel. Travel can reinvent (as in the case of Lefty) or diminish (as in the case of Desdemona). The religious overtones can be traced back to the ancient Greek epics that the author self-consciously follows, where travel usually sees a hero dramatically altered by the end of their journey.