Am I ever glad I did! I loved it: it's a big, rich, funny, touching family story, beginning with Desdemona and Lefty, who are brother and sister, also third cousins, who end up marrying one another. Calliope, the "girl" in the novel, is their grand-daughter: raised as a girl, she discovers her true sexuality on her 16th birthday. Calliope has inherited a recessive mutation gene, passed on through families where there is incest or inbreeding.
This is a Greek-American family: the story starts in Greece before the first war, then continues in the depression years in Detroit. Middlesex is the name of the family's street addres in Detroit"; it's an unusual house, without any standard doors; Calliope's father has made his money in hot dog stands all across America. The fact that the street address is used as the title is significant, because so is Calliope: with characteristics and physical traits both male and female. Calliope, incidentally, was the name given to the Greek muse of eloquence and epic poetry.
Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel and deservedly so: it is a sweeping portrait of America: its politics, sexual mores, coming- of-age, cars, scams, hitch-hiking, a real trip through time. Eugenides, in his interview with Oprah, which is worth a second-look online, calls the book " a modern myth". He also acknowledges that, although the word "hermaphrodite" was chosen because of its Greek derivation: the Greek god Tiresias was a hermaphrodite, he does acknowledge that a better word, and one without pejorative connotations would be "intersex".
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