Awards
2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction
From Powells.com
In 1993, Jeffrey Eugenides published The Virgin Suicides, a spellbinding novel about five mysterious sisters in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and the boys whose lives they would forever change. Middlesex, the author's long awaited follow-up, introduces another Grosse Pointe family: the Stephanides. Reaching across generations, continents, and genders, it's a broad, comic epic, tracing the path of a mutant gene to one Calliope Stephanides. In Cal, our storyteller, that gene finds expression. Eugenides explained in part, "I see it as a family story. I used a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for the sexual confusion and confusion of identity that everyone goes through in adolescence." "[A]n uproarious epic, at once funny and sad," Michiko Kakutani raved in the New York Times. "Mr. Eugenides has a keen sociological eye for 20th-century American life....But it's his emotional wisdom, his nuanced insight into his characters' inner lives, that lends this book its cumulative power." Dave, Powells.com
Staff Pick
This engrossing, amazing story of a person born intersex won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. Eugenides skillfully walks the line between heartbreaking and laugh-out-loud funny, rendering the novel so emotionally accurate and insightful that it reads like a memoir. Beautifully written and remarkable in its scope and accomplishment, Middlesex is a masterpiece! Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, graduated from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides (FSG), was published in 1993.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A New York Times Editors' Choice
A Los Angeles Times Best Book
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
Lambda Literary Award Nominee
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between themalong with Callie's failure to develop physicallyleads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs is a rare genetic mutationand a guilty secretthat have followed Callie's grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family's second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the gene's epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.
Spanning eight decadesand one unusually awkward adolescenceJeffrey Eugenides' long-awaited second novel is a grand, original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"Impressive [and] wonderfully engaging . . . A Buddenbrooks-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream . . . [Eugenides] has not only followed up on a precocious debut with a broader and more ambitious book, but in doing so, he has also delivered a deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century."Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Impressive [and] wonderfully engaging . . . A Buddenbrooks-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream . . . [Eugenides] has not only followed up on a precocious debut with a broader and more ambitious book, but in doing so, he has also delivered a deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century . . . It is a novel that employs all its author's rich storytelling talents to give us one Greek-American family's idiosyncratic journey from the not-so-pearly gates of Ellis Island to the suburban vistas of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, while at the same time tracing the rise and fall in fortunes of Detroit, from its apotheosis as the Motor City in the 40's and 50's through the race riots of 1967 and its subsequent decline. It is also a novel that invokes ancient myths and contemporary pop songs to show how family traits and inclinations are passed down generation to generation, a novel that uses musical leitmotifs to show the unexpected ways in which chance and fate weave their improvisations into the loom of family life."Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"One of the delights of Middlesex is how soundly it's constructed, with motifs and characters weaving through the novel's episodes, pulling it tight . . . His narrator is a soul who inhabits a liminal realm, a creature able to bridge the divisions that plague humanity, endowed with 'the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both. That utopian reach makes Middlesex deliriously American; the novel's patron saint is Walt Whitman, and it has some of the shagginess of that poet's verse to go along with the exuberance. But mostly it is a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination and of love."Laura Miller, The New York Times Book Review
"A towering achievement . . . A story that manages to be both illuminating and transcendent . . . [Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer many of us suspected him of being."Jeff Turrentine, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A big, cheeky, splendid novel, and its confidence is part of its success, because it goes places few narrators would dare to tread . . . Because Eugenides has imbued his second novel with transcontinental range and historical depth, he has thrown open the gates of Ithaca and sent his narrator on the road. And because he has remembered that the human experience of it is the sine qua non of any adventure, he has given us something lyrical and fine."Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe
"Middlesex is a novel about discovery, one man's discovery of his place in the world and acceptance of his singularity, his uniqueness. In the process, it is a novel that challenges our preconceptions about gender and our understanding of the universal truths of growing up and growing old."Michael Pearson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"The verbal energy and narrative range of Saul Bellow's early fiction (say, The Adventures of Augie March) are born again in this dazzling novel . . . A virtuosic combination of elegy, sociohistorical study, and picaresque adventure: altogether irresistible."Kirkus Reviews
“In his second novel, the author once again proves himself to be a wildly imaginative writer . . . Likely to hold readers in thrall with its affecting characterizations of a brave and lonely soul and its vivid depiction of exactly what it means to be both male and female.”Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
"Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart. Highly recommended."Library Journal
"From the opening paragraph, in which the narrator explains that he was 'born twice,' first as a baby girl in 1960, then as a teenage boy in 1974, readers are aware that Calliope Stephanides is a hermaphrodite. To explain his situation, Cal starts in 1922, when his grandparents came to America. In his role as the 'prenatal narrator,' he tells the love story of this couple, who are brother and sister; his parents are blood relatives as well. Then he tells his own story, which is that of a female child growing up in suburban Detroit with typical adolescent concerns. Callie, as he is know then, worries because she hasn't developed breasts or started menstruating; her facial hair is blamed on her ethnicity, and she and her mother go to get waxed together. She develops a passionate crush on her best girlfriend, 'the Object,' and consummates it in a manner both detached and steamy. Then an accident causes Callie to find out what she's been suspectingshe's not actually a girl. The story questions what it is that makes us who we are and concludes that one's inner essence stays the same, even in light of drastic outer changes. Mostly, the novel remains a universal narrative of a girl who's happy to grow up but hates having to leave her old self behind. Readers will love watching the narrator go from Callie to Cal, and witnessing all of the life experiences that get her there."School Library Journal
"Jeffrey Eugenides is a big and big-hearted talent, and Middlesex is a weird, wonderful novel that will sweep you off your feet."Jonathan Franzen
Review
"With a sure yet light-handed touch, Eugenides skillfully bends our notions of gender as we realize, along with Cal, that although he has been raised as a girl, he is more comfortable as a boy." Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
Review
"Middlesex vibrates with wit....A virtuosic combination of elegy, sociohistorical study, and picaresque adventure: altogether irrestistable." Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
Synopsis
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, graduated from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides (FSG), was published in 1993.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A New York Times Editors' Choice
A Los Angeles Times Best Book
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
Lambda Literary Award Nominee
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between themalong with Callie's failure to develop physicallyleads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs is a rare genetic mutationand a guilty secretthat have followed Callie's grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family's second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. Andeven though the gene's epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.
Spanning eight decadesand one unusually awkward adolescenceJeffrey Eugenides' long-awaited second novel is a grand, original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"Impressive [and] wonderfully engaging . . . A Buddenbrooks-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream . . . [Eugenides] has not only followed up on a precocious debut with a broader and more ambitious book, but in doing so, he has also delivered a deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century."Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Impressive [and] wonderfully engaging . . . A Buddenbrooks-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream . . . [Eugenides] has not only followed up on a precocious debut with a broader and more ambitious book, but in doing so, he has also delivered a deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century . . . It is a novel that employs all its author's rich storytelling talents to give us one Greek-American family's idiosyncratic journey from the not-so-pearly gates of Ellis Island to the suburban vistas of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, while at the same time tracing the rise and fall in fortunes of Detroit, from its apotheosis as the Motor City in the 40's and 50's through the race riots of 1967 and its subsequent decline. It is also a novel that invokes ancient myths and contemporary pop songs to show how family traits and inclinations are passed down generation to generation, a novel that uses musical leitmotifs to show the unexpected ways in which chance and fate weave their improvisations into the loom of family life."Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"One of the delights of Middlesex is how soundly it's constructed, with motifs and characters weaving through the novel's episodes, pulling it tight . . . His narrator is a soul who inhabits a liminal realm, a creature able to bridge the divisions that plague humanity, endowed with 'the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both. That utopian reach makes Middlesex deliriously American; the novel's patron saint is Walt Whitman, and it has some of the shagginess of that poet's verse to go along with the exuberance. But mostly it is a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination and of love."Laura Miller, The New York Times Book Review
"A towering achievement . . . A story that manages to be both illuminating and transcendent . . . [Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer many of us suspected him of being."Jeff Turrentine, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"A big, cheeky, splendid novel, and its confidence is part of its success, because it goes places few narrators would dare to tread . . . Because Eugenides has imbued his second novel with transcontinental range and historical depth, he has thrown open the gates of Ithaca and sent his narrator on the road. And because he has remembered that the human experience of it is the sine qua non of any adventure, he has given us something lyrical and fine."Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe
"Middlesex is a novel about discovery, one man's discovery of his place in the world and acceptance of his singularity, his uniqueness. In the process, it is a novel that challenges our preconceptions about gender and our understanding of the universal truths of growing up and growing old."Michael Pearson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution
"The verbal energy and narrative range of Saul Bellow's early fiction (say, The Adventures of Augie March) are born again in this dazzling novel . . . A virtuosic combination of elegy, sociohistorical study, and picaresque adventure: altogether irresistible."Kirkus Reviews
“In his second novel, the author once again proves himself to be a wildly imaginative writer . . . Likely to hold readers in thrall with its affecting characterizations of a brave and lonely soul and its vivid depiction of exactly what it means to be both male and female.”Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist
"Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart. Highly recommended."Library Journal
"From the opening paragraph, in which the narrator explains that he was 'born twice,' first as a baby girl in 1960, then as a teenage boy in 1974, readers are aware that Calliope Stephanides is a hermaphrodite. To explain his situa
Synopsis
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent drivers license...records my first name simply as Cal."So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. Middlesex is the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Synopsis
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school, Grosse Pointe, MI, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia - back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives, back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Sprawling across eight decades - and one unusually awkward adolescence - Jeffrey Eugenide's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Audie Award for best unabridged fiction, Middlesex marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
Synopsis
"I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent drivers license...records my first name simply as Cal."So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
Synopsis
A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides--the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond clasmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them--along with Callie's failure to develop--leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
Synopsis
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school, Grosse Pointe, MI, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them - along with Callie's failure to develop - leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia - back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives, back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Sprawling across eight decades - and one unusually awkward adolescence - Jeffrey Eugenide's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Audie Award for best unabridged fiction, Middlesex marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
About the Author
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, the third son of an American-born father whose Greek parents emigrated from Asia Minor and an American mother of Anglo-Irish descent. Mr. Eugenides was educated at public and private schools, graduated from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. Two years later, in 1988, he published his first short story.
Mr. Eugenides' first novel, The Virgin Suicides (FSG), was published in 1993. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, the Gettysburg Review, and Granta. His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the past few years he has been a Fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American Academy in Berlin. Mr. Eugenides now lives in Berlin, Germany, with his wife and daughter.
Reading Group Guide
Discussion Questions
1. Describing his own conception, Cal writes: "The timing of the thing had to be just so in order for me to become the person I am. Delay the act by an hour and you change the gene selection." (p. 11) Is Cals condition a result of chance or fate? Which of these forces governs the world as Cal sees it?
2. Middlesex begins just before Cals birth in 1960, then moves backward in time to 1922. Cal is born at the beginning of Book Three, about halfway through the novel. Why did the author choose to structure the story this way? How does this movement backward and forward in time reflect the larger themes of the work?
3. When Tessie and Milton decide to try to influence the sex of their baby, Desdemona disapproves. "God decides what baby is," she says. "Not you." (p.13) What happens when characters in the novel challenge fate?
4. "To be honest, the amusement grounds should be closed at this hour, but, for my own purposes, tonight Electric Park is open all night, and the fog suddenly lifts, all so that my grandfather can look out the window and see a roller coaster streaking down the track. A moment of cheap symbolism only, and then I have to bow to the strict rules of realism, which is to say: they cant see a thing." (pp. 110-11) Occasionally, Cal interrupts his own narrative, calling attention to himself and the artifice inherent in his story. What purpose do these interruptions serve? Is Cal a reliable narrator?
5. "Ive never had the right words to describe my life, and now that Ive entered my story, I need them more than ever," Cal writes (p. 217). How does Cal narrate the events that take place before his birth? Does his perspective as a narrator change when he is recounting events that take place after he is born?
6. "All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, theres an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell." (p.20) What does Cal mean by this? Is his manner of telling his story connected to the question of his gender? How?
7. How are Cals early sexual experiences similar to those of an adolescent? How are they different? Are the differences more significant than the similarities?
8. Why does Cal decide to live as a man rather than as a woman?
9. How does Cals experience reflect on the "nature vs. nurture" debate about gender identity?
10. Who is Johnny Zizmo? How does he influence the course of events in the novel?
11. What is Dr. Luces role in the novel? Would you describe him as a villain?
12. Calliope is the name the classical Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry. What elements of Greek mythology figure in Cals story? Is this novel meant to be a new myth?
13. How is Cals experience living within two genders similar to the immigrant experience of living within two cultures? How is it different?
14. Middlesex is set against the backdrop of several historical events: the war between Greece and Turkey, the rise of the Nation of Islam, World War II, and the Detroit riots. How does history shape the lives of the characters in the novel?
15. What does America represent for Desdemona? For Milton? For Cal? To what extent do you think these characters different visions of America correspond to their status as first-, second-, and third-generation Greek Americans?
16. What role does race play in the novel? How do the Detroit riots of 1967 affect the Stephanides family and Cal, specifically?
17. Describe Middlesex. Does the house have a symbolic function in the novel?
18. "Everything about Middlesex spoke of forgetting and everything about Desdemona made plain the inescapability of remembering," Cal writes (p.273). How and when do Desdemonas Old World values conflict with the ethos of America, and, specifically, of Middlesex?
19. The final sentence of the novel reads: "I lost track after a while, happy to be home, weeping for my father, and thinking about what was next." (p. 529) What is next for Cal? Does the author give us reason to believe that Cals relationship with Julie will be successful?
20. "Watching from the cab, Milton came face-to-face with the essence of tragedy, which is something determined before youre born, something you cant escape or do anything about, no matter how hard you try." (p. 426) According to this definition, is Cals story a tragedy?