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I had heard of this book by Jeffrey Eugenides, but I didn’t really know what it was about. The synopsis didn’t do anything to grab my interest, but my book club was reading it, so in the interest of getting out of my house and actually socializing with real human beings (and fellow readers!), I decided to give this book a try.
I don’t know how to rate it because it was very well written, but I didn’t like it. There’s no specific reason why I didn’t like it, it just didn’t do anything in particular to grab and hold my interest.
The book is about a hermaphrodite named Calliope/Cal who narrates the story. He (I’m mostly gonna go with the male pronoun here because he made the decision to live as a male) talks about how the rare genetic mutation that made him a hermaphrodite started with his family in Turkey. It turned out his paternal grandparents were secretly brother and sister and also third cousins.
Eugenides spends the first two hundred pages of the book explaining how the grandparents fell in love, were chased out of their home when the whole village was burned down in a war between the Greeks and the Turks, pretended to meet and fall in love on the ship to America so they could get married without anyone knowing they were related, and started their lives in America. It goes into detail about the things they did to survive in America as immigrants during Prohibition and the Great Depression, how they raised their children, and how Cal’s grandmother, Desdemona, worried constantly about the consequences of marrying and having children with her brother.
Then it talks about their children growing up, making lives of their own, and how their son, Milton, fell in love with, married, and had children with his cousin, Tessie. Milton and Tessie’s first child, who we only ever hear referred to as “Chapter Eleven” with no explanation for that name, appears to be fine, and Calliope appears normal and healthy at first. The narrator describes a couple early instances in which her “enlarged clitoris” (it’s not quite long enough to be considered a penis and the urethra opens up underneath it, rather than at the tip) was overlooked due to negligence, old age, and (mostly) the fact that people just tend to see only what they want and expect to see.
Calliope doesn’t have any problems growing up as a girl. She’s happy, well adjusted, and loves her family. She makes friends and has a few early sexual experimentations with girlfriends.
It’s not until she hits puberty that the problems start. She doesn’t get her period. She doesn’t develop breasts or hips. She’s aware that her genitalia don’t look like the other girls’ so she goes to lengths to keep them obscured at all times.
When she’s in high school, there’s an accident and Callie ends up in the hospital, whereupon her “condition” finally becomes known. Her parents take her to a specialist in New York City who keeps Callie in his clinic, conducts multiple tests and lengthy interviews with her, and finally determines that, although hormonally she is mostly male, she has been raised and identifies as a girl.
The problem with this is that Callie lied to him in her interviews. She desperately wants to be seen as normal, so she doesn’t tell him about her attraction to or sexual experiments with her girlfriends. Instead she makes up stories about being attracted to boys. But when she becomes aware of what’s really going on and then finds out the doctor wants to operate on her to get rid of her “enlarged clitoris”, and inject her with hormones to make her more feminine, she revolts.
Knowing her parents wouldn’t understand and would force her to have the surgery, Callie writes them a note and runs away. She starts dressing as a boy and teaching herself to walk, talk, and move like a boy. She cuts off all her long hair and starts going by Cal.
Cal makes it to San Francisco where he just kind of hangs out for a while. He meets another hermaphrodite, who lives as a lesbian and goes on long rants about how awful men are. Through her, Cal learns to accept himself just the way he is. He eventually goes back home to be reunited with his family, who seem surprisingly accepting of all these changes. I would have liked to see much more of how the narrator transitioned from being Callie to Cal after being reunited with her family.
At that point he has a discussion with his grandmother, who has gone senile by this point. She confesses to him her great sin of marrying her brother, which explains how Cal was able to tell the reader the whole story from the beginning.
The story was told from the perspective of adult Cal looking back on his family history and childhood. He frequently referenced things that happened later, without much explanation. It all makes sense as the reader finishes the book, and I appreciated the way it kind of came full circle by explaining how Cal came to know about things that happened before he was born and were kept super secret.
Cal also intersperses his history with a story about how he starts flirting with a girl he meets in Berlin while he’s working there. The whole time he’s complaining that the relationship can’t go anywhere because no relationship he’s ever had can ever go anywhere because no one can ever truly accept him for what he is. That’s why he chose a job that keeps him moving from place to place (I forget what he actually does). That part of the story was wrapped up quickly and a little too neatly.
I liked the way the story was told. It really felt like someone telling you a story from their life, including little asides and breaks to explain things before continuing. I just didn’t fall in love with any of the characters. I didn’t hate them either, it’s just that the whole experience was pretty “meh” for me.
That said, I would still recommend this book to other readers, especially if you’re looking for a good read on gender identity.
What did you guys read this week? Anything that underwhelmed you? I want to hear all about it!