The most wonderful and difficult thing about Middlesex is how much it covers. It’s about gender. It’s about family. America. Identity. Genetics. Tradition. Time. The stories we tell.
(I learned on my third day of classes that in French, “héritage” means both heritage and inheritance.)
Though the book’s protagonist and narrator, Cal, lives a content existence away from home, he captures the Midwest in a way that, counterintuitively, makes me want to come running back to it. Though Cal takes the reader through trauma — his own trauma, his family’s trauma, nations’ traumas in the forms of abuse and war and riot — I still read a reference to the Prairie School of architecture or a rust belt city and wished I was home.
(My hometown is Racine, Wisconsin. I learned on that same day of class that “racine” in French means “origin.”)
I’ve been spending my time since then wondering why I feel this way. Part of it, I think, is that Cal’s fantastical family story makes me want to search for a one of my own. It’s easy for me to believe I wasn’t born from two parents in a town in the American Midwest but rather assembled by a machine in a now-closed factory. That I’m made of tractor parts assembled on a line, not a code of nucleotides that came from Norway and Ireland and Germany.
(On the first day of 11th grade, my English teacher, a great poet named Bianca Diaz, read us this:
“We all grow up with the weight of history on us. Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.” — Shirley Abbott, Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South)
Reading Middlesex felt a little like finding the door to the attic.
The other reason I think I wanted to go home is because reading the book made the world feel really big and really small at the same time. And when the Earth expands and contracts that much it’s easy to want to go home and carve yourself out a space in the world before it shrivels up, before it explodes.
It’s incredible, in many ways, how relevant the book, originally published in 2003, is to current events. At train stations I tried my best to translate headlines about the current refugee crisis in Europe. Then I’d return to the book, reading descriptions of bodies in the Mediterranean in a scene from 1922 that matched the pictures I saw in the newspapers. I read about the Black Lives Matter movement, growing 4,600 miles away, as Cal described the “war at home” — the race riots — in Detroit, in 1964. I read about the growing trans rights movement while reading a remarkable story about a person who is born a girl but becomes a man.
(I read in the news last week that physicists can’t explain why, exactly, all equations for time work the same with time going forwards and backwards. But they do. The arrow moves both ways.)
Middlesex is, in a lot of ways, about the power of the stories we tell over time, and that’s true within the book and outside it. Middlesex is a work of fiction, but it somehow made the news more real to me in my first weeks here, when everything felt so bizarre and out of place. It translated the world for me. Expanded it. Gave it feeling and depth and context. It made sense of heritage and inheritance being the same word. Reminded me that time moves backwards and forwards. That it spirals, like a double helix.
(My favorite line in Middlesex: “We Greeks get married in circles, to impress upon ourselves the essential matrimonial facts: that to be happy you have to find variety in repetition; that to go forward you have to come back where you began.”)
