Reading Notes: Middlesex

20Nov07

This was a book recommended to me with rave reviews, and the exotic and erotic controversy at the heart of the story made me give it a chance. Though it was sometimes slow going, last night I read the satisfying conclusion of Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. I recommend giving it a try, but am not yet sure if I found this book to be quite as thrilling and amazing as everyone else did. Read on for further critique…

According to an ancient Chinese legend, one day in the year 2640 B.C., Princess Si Ling-chi was sitting under a mulberry tree when a silkworm cocoon fell into her teacup. When she tried to remove it, she noticed the cocoon had begun to unravel in the hot liquid. She handed the loose end to her maidservant and told her to walk. The servant went out of the princess’ chamber, and into the countryside a half mile away before the cocoon ran out. (In the West, this legend would slowly mutate over three millenium until it became the story of a physicist and an apple. Either way, the meanings are the same: great discoveries, whether of silk or of gravity, are always windfalls. They happen to people loafing under trees.)

I feel a little like that Chinese princess, whose discovery gave Desdemona her livelihood. Like her I unravel my story, and the longer the thread, the less there is left to tell. Retrace the filament and you go back to the cocoon’s beginning in a tiny knot, a first tentative loop. And following my story’s thread back to where I left off, I see the Jean Bart dock in Athens. I see my grandparents on land again, making preparations for another voyage. Passports are placed into hands, vaccinations administered to upper arms. Another ship materializes at the dock, the Giulia. A foghorn sounds.

The story is a beautiful web of perspectives as imagined by the central character Cal, a hermaphrodite with a deep Greek heritage and raised as a girl in 1960’s middle-class Detroit. Her story becomes His in the early 1970’s, though the narrative voice is so clear and authentic throughout, it is difficult to tell if it is merely a matter of formality that Cal be labelled by any sort of gender reference.

The historical context is believable and deeply researched, and of course relates in cultural themes to the protagonists’ story and final outcome. Several people who recommended this book and raved endlessly about it – “I can’t wait to discuss it with you!” – seem very taken with the alluring taboo of the sexual content of this novel. They want to discuss gender identity, hermaphroditism, and in particular the cultural revolutions taking place in the backdrop of the story, which I suspect these individuals to be fondly recalling.

You see, this book was recommended to me by my parent’s generation (mostly my mother, who generally has excellent literary taste). These are the fortold baby-boomers. The generation that ancient legend describes as emerging from the middle-class bloom that took place after WWII. Their political personas are formed by the events of the 1960’s-70’s. This book spoke deeply to that perspective, and I think that somehow I may have missed the full magnitude of the story within its’ context due to being a child of the digital era; a profound sense of “you had to be there”.

Adding to this slight disjoint is the use of cinematic language, as illustrated toward the end of the excerpt. Perhaps it is my eternal disappointment in every good-book turned-into-a-movie I have ever seen, if only because the literal-language of film destroys the singular sensation that the power of the original written words impart in reading – it is permission to imagine.

Cinematic language is all cuts, editing out the excess to give the viewer one image that in context means only what the director wants it to mean. Thus the story progresses, one transition after another, and all built with snippets of the whole – the viewer is meant to see what they see when they see it. (Of course, the best cinematic language makes the transitions seamless, offering just enough room for interpretation, and at no point is the viewer forced out of the story.)

Consider then, how cinematic language in novels drives this particular reader mad. Cut to clenched fist. Zoom to furrowed brow and distressed eyes. Fade. Literal language in prose is not always distracting to me, but in too many recent novels it has become gimmicky. I had to stop reading Barbara Kingsolver and Margaret Atwood (whose early works I greatly enjoyed) for that reason; the language became too cinematic, with too much directive and not enough space for me, the reader, to get in between the lines.

Middlesex falls prey to some of the same tendencies, and I would regularly lose track of the narrator’s voice – suddenly I was having to follow the camera in carefully punctuated jump cuts through the moment, and I found myself distanced from the overall authenticity and momentum of the story.

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