In suburban Detroit, a young person has been raised as a girl as far as puberty, when gradually she (as she identifies at the time) and her family begin to realise that that might not be what she is at all. As Calliope (“Cal”) begins to develop more masculine characteristics, she also begins to learn that she will have to create her own place in society as neither male nor female.
…is what I thought I’d be getting with this book. I didn’t know a lot about it, but what I (thought I) knew was that the main character was an intersex person and the book was about their struggles in carving a social niche. In fact, the bulk of the book barely has the protagonist/narrator Cal in it at all (except as the narratorial voice, obviously). The first two-thirds or so take as their focus the journey of Cal’s genetic mutation, following Cal’s grandparents from their small village in Greece, where the science of inbreeding has not yet made an impact and sometimes babies are born a little different. (Let me say this: if you’re squeamish about inbreeding and/or full-on incest, this may not be the novel for you. It goes there. It contains the least-sexy consensual sex scene I can recall reading; I had to go read a Sarah Waters novel afterwards to get the taste out of my brain.)
I’m interested in the choice to set the American part of the book in Detroit. It could just be laziness, as Eugenides (whose name means something like good genes or well-bred – right?) evidently grew up there. But Detroit is the spiritual home of a particular kind of American-ness, of capitalism and mass-production, while simultaneously also representing its inevitable decline. There’s a Detroit-ian sense that American conformity can’t support its own weight. It’s true that this is reflected in the exploration of Cal’s gender identity, the revelations about which require Cal to travel first to New York and then to San Francisco. But the novel seems more focused in some ways on exploring the immigrant experience. When Cal’s father, having made his fortune, tries to buy a house in an affluent neighbourhood, he is stymied by the estate agents’ system of literally scoring prospective buyers’ suitability depending on their backgrounds and business interests. (Cal’s father gets around this system the same way his Jewish neighbours did: by paying in cash.) Cal has a similar, though less formalised, experience trying to fit in at her private middle school. There’s a reason why Cal, at the time of narrating the novel, has moved to Berlin. No culture requires conformity the same way an immigrant culture does.
So no, it wasn’t what I expected. In a sense Eugenides could have created a more straightforward story of the experience of an intersex protagonist by jettisoning the immigrant narrative – but since when was the point of novels to be more straightforward? The result is a gratifyingly complex reflection on belonging and family, with a lightness of tone that keeps it readable and a warmth of self-deprecation in the narrator’s voice.