I finished reading Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides. I had read his Virgin Suicides back in college, but I didn’t remember much of that book. So I went into Middlesex as a kind of blank slate.

One sentence summary: Cal, who is affected by a rare form of hermaphrodism, tells the epic story of his Greek family’s history and his rocky childhood as a girl. (I like one sentence summaries because it’s probably the thing that got the agent, editor, sales coordinator, and bookstore buyer all riled up to begin with. So there you have it, the simplistic thingie that got the book on shelves.)

Cal is a disarming narrator, and he makes good use of his hermaphrodite body to tempt us through the century of backstory he slogs through. I say “slog” because it’s the anticipation of The Reveal that keeps you reading. You feel disgusting thinking it, but the truth is our innate curiosity about people who are different–especially if they’re different below the belt–makes us do crazy things. Like root for incest. But Eugenides gives us all a pass when Cal performs in a sideshow as a sexual freak, only to realize the audience is genuinely attracted to him. It frees him from thinking there’s anything wrong with him, and it frees us from thinking we’re going to hell. Hooray!

Through the wonders of Teh Internet, I happen to know some people who are trans or intersex or eunuch-identified, and it’s a very difficult thing not to run to them and say, “So heeeeeey, Middlesex. Thumbs up or down?” It would be the equivalent of walking up to a British person and saying, “So heeeeey, new Doctor Who. Are you guys for him or no?” One would hope one could form one’s own opinion about the value of a work that could so easily represent or misrepresent a segment of the population. So leaving all my quasi-normative guilt aside, I say thumbs up for Middlesex. It was good in a way that the narrator’s voice followed me around for a little while, and that’s pretty neat.

Also, did I mention the rooting for incest thing? It might sound creepy, but props to anyone who can get a reader to do that!

The moral of the story, if we dealt in one-sentence summaries for our lives themselves, would probably be: Good books make you feel things you didn’t want to feel, and they’re so good, you can’t even feel guilty about it.

Currently reading: The Yiddish Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon