I had previously been told that Middlesex was a very good book. It was earlier this year that I was told that by a friend who almost weekly was reading a good book. She explained it: a boy that was raised a girl but was really a hermaphrodite, the best part of it was when she was a teenager. I put it on my mental list of books to read. I’d forget and occasionally I’d ask my friend, ‘what was the name of that book you read, the one with the hermaphrodite?’ She’d tell me and I’d eventually proceed to forget. During this time I was deep into Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels. Time passes from early this year to two weeks ago when I get an email from Barnes and Noble saying something about Middlesex and it being on Oprah’s Book Club. Now, I’ve never in my life shown interest in any of the books on Oprah’s list, why I decided to show interest now, I know not. Maybe because someone I knew told me it was a good book. Someone I knew that had good judgment. Someone that I knew personally, it being on Oprah’s list was perhaps just a reminder of the book I said I’d like to read but never got around to it. I don’t know. But I bought it.
I don’t know what it was about this book, I struggled with it, and yet, as someone put it ‘you read it like it’s a book for a class and yet you’re not in school anymore’. I couldn’t put it down. I’d get to a part where I’m asking myself, ‘when is this ever going to end? when am I going to get to something good?’ and I wouldn’t put it down. There are countless books that I’ve begun and never finished because I can’t get into them, and yet I kept going with this one. What it was that kept me going I’m not sure, but I kept going.
I know that I’ve read books that were written in a similar style and yet I can’t identify them. Books that jump around from past to present, past to present, past to present, and back and forth over and over again. It was crucial that the story be told in the manner that it was so that you got an idea of what had brought ‘him’ to where he currently was. More important than that was that you needed the history of his grandparents and parents to make his story important. So even though it was through the times where he’s talking about his grandparents or parents and he’s not even a twinkle in his parents eyes yet (or even before they existed) that I couldn’t understand why I was reading about them, it came back around into a full circle. Every little story in the book closed itself. Every story except for the present. When it ended, I wasn’t ready for it to end, I wanted to know ‘what happens now?’ We strolled through the past, I know what happened, but now I want to know what’s going to happen in the present.
It was an ok book overall, I’m not sure that it’s a significant book, one that I will recommend to people. I should qualify ‘ok’ it was ok in the sense that at times I was interested, at other times I wondered why I was reading it. It was excellent in the manner in which it was written and how the story was told. Maybe my problem is its genre, historical fiction (which is where I classify it, I have no clue what it really is) really isn’t my thing. I’m more of a Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Mystery kindof gal.
The one thing that I was shocked by, was that Middlesex wasn’t the condition I thought it was. When you pick up the book and read the back, you (or at least I) correlate Middlesex with hermaphrodite. It just made sense that way. But as you read, you come to learn that Middlesex is a place. The family moves into a house on a road named Middlesex and the house is very much a metaphor for Cal. It wasn’t a normal house, it was odd, it stood out, it was freakish, like Cal. The way the house is described, you can almost see the paleness of Tessie’s face when Milton takes her through it for the first time and tells her that this is ‘our house’. Similar to the paleness that would’ve been seen when she’s told that her daughter isn’t exactly a daughter. I can’t articulate my words well enough to explain where I’m headed with this, perhaps because I’m not sure where I’m headed. Maybe it’s just that what I thought Middlesex was and what it turned out to be are metaphors of each other. I don’t normally pay attention to that stuff, but I picked up on this one…
