Serios Fiction Fan Club July meeting

After considerable discussion, the group selected "Middlesex," the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides as the July book. It's a worthy choice.

The action is narrated by a young girl, Calliope, a privileged third generation Greek-American girl, growing up within the exclusive Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe, daughter of a successful immigrant family. Much of the early novel is epic in scope with powerfully written pages devoted to escape by the grandparents in the early twenties from the genocidal Turkish war and even more powerful scenes of the rise of the automobile industry, the trauma of unionization, and the black riots that burned down much of Detroit in the sixties.

As Calliope approaches puberty she discovers an attraction to girls, which leads to careful medical examinations. Her genitalia is described in terms of a budding crocus that conceals a tiny penis within its folds. Miniature hidden testes explain her narrow hips, lack of breasts, and failure to menstruate. She is packed off to a world-renowned sex reassignment clinic for surgery.

Calliope, however, has other ideas. She bolts, renames herself Cal, and runs away to the more understanding society of San Francisco. Along the way, we learn the affliction is the result of a regressive gene passed along by the unfortunate facts of her immediate heredity. Through a series of flashbacks we learn that her grandparents were actually brother and sister and that her parents were cousins.

The story about Cal growing up to become a well educated, sensitive, but always tentative young man is full of adventure, drama, and insight.

This brief review includes only the roughest outline, the full story being infinitely richer and more compelling. It is serious literary fiction of exactly the sort that attracts the reading interests of our group.