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BOOK
DESCRIPTION: As the Age
of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect
our fictional protagonists to know as much about the
chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes
knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin
Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully
written novel begins: "Specialized readers may
have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender
Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.'
" The "me" of that sentence,
"Cal" Stephanides, narrates his story of
sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his
immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. On board
the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America,
they married-but they were brother and sister.
Eugenides spends the book's first half recreating,
with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s
and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car
factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black
Muslims. Then comes Cal's story, which is necessarily
interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory.
Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and
parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile,
Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a
daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby.
Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history, and
Callie is left to think of her "crocus" as
simply unusually long-until she reaches the age of 14.
Eugenides, like Rick Moody, has an extraordinary
sensitivity to the mores of our leafier suburbs, and
Cal's gender confusion is blended with the story of
her first love, Milton's growing political resentments
and the general shedding of ethnic habits. Perhaps the
most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides's
ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the
man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious male
writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending
the stereotypes of gender. This is one determinedly
literary novel that should also appeal to a large,
general audience.
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