Is he, or isn’t she?

Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex

By John Freeman

Middlesex By Jeffrey Eugenides's, Farrar,Straus & Giroux. 544 pages. $27.

A double entendre lurks in the title of Jeffrey Eugenides’s fantastic second novel, Middlesex. The book’s narrator, Cal Stephanides, is a hermaphrodite raised as a girl but now living as a man. Middlesex also refers to the leafy street in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, where Cal’s family of Greek émigrés lives as outsiders among Detroit’s lily-white upper crust in the early 1970s. Over 500 pages, the novel traces the Stephanideses’ turbulent journey to this posh suburban outpost, revealing how sexual and cultural displacement recur throughout their history, culminating in the birth of Cal. “To go forward you have to come back where you began,” Cal says wistfully at his tale’s commencement. And so this yarn begins in 1922, the year a brother and sister — Cal’s grandparents, Lefty and Desdemona — fall desperately in love.

That same year, the Turks defeat the Greek Army, forcing Lefty and Desdemona to flee to America, where they hide the circumstances of their incestuous marriage. Identity, as it turns out, is not all they must change. They retool their professional skills, suffer the Depression, raise kids and watch them become more American than they. Their only son — Cal’s father, Milton — marries his cousin, fights in WW2, and returns home to become the millionaire owner of a hot dog-stand chain named Hercules, in honor of his Greek roots.

Narrating this rags-to-riches tale from the present day, Cal ferries his family’s stories along at an old-fashioned pace, savoring each detail with tender nostalgia. Although Cal’s many Proustian moments pad out this story — the novel is triple the length of Eugenides’s first, The Virgin Suicides — they’re worth it. Recalling his father’s car, for example, Cal tells us that Milton’s “Cadillac was as plushly carpeted and softly lit as the bar at the Ritz. The interior itself was black leather and gave off a strong new smell. It was like climbing into somebody’s wallet.”

Money, Middlesex elegantly shows, can be the ultimate vehicle of deracination, and Cal is proof of that. Raised as Calliope, the daughter of privilege, she attends an all-girl’s school in clogs and Izod shirts. By the time she reaches her teens, Cal’s heritage can only be guessed at by hearing her speak: “There were signs only a linguist could pick up,” Cal tells us, “middle-class elisions, grace notes passed down from Greek into Midwestern twang.”

Like her ethnicity, Cal’s sexuality falls dormant a long time, too, and Eugenides doesn’t fully explore this until the book’s final hundred pages. It’s initially disappointing that we don’t arrive at Cal’s story proper until the book is almost over and that the author rushes us headlong through such a painful discovery. In the end, however, Eugenides does such a superb job of capturing the ironies and trade-offs of assimilation that upon finishing Middlesex, Calliope’s evolution into Cal doesn’t feel sudden at all but more like a transformation we’ve gone through ourselves.

John Freeman can be reached at freeman109@hotmail.com.

The Story of Lucy Gault The Story of Lucy Gault By William Trevor. Viking Press. 288 pages. $24.95. William Trevor’s new novel, The Story of Lucy Gault, opens in Ireland during the early 1920s, a time of bloody civil war. Young thugs have begun to visit the home of the book’s protagonist, a retired Irish army captain married to an Englishwoman, threatening to burn the place down. After one exchange ends in gunfire, Captain Gault finally agrees to abandon his family’s ancestral seat. Even more tragically, on the day of the Gaults’ departure, Lucy, their nine-year-old daughter, disappears. After searching for Lucy for weeks, the Gaults presume her dead and leave Ireland for good. A few days later, Lucy turns up at the estate, but, by then, all attempt to reach the Gaults fail. The rest of this novel reveals how differently Lucy and her parents adapt to their respective fates. Trevor shifts elegantly between these two worlds, marking the passage of time with terse, but stately prose. The Gaults deal with their sadness by acting as if Ireland never was, traveling to a small village in Italy where they embark on new lives together. But while Mrs. Gault seems well suited to exile, Captain Gault is not. His grief hardens into brittle resignation. Lucy, meanwhile, settles down to a life-long vigil for her parents’ return, a period Trevor evokes with subtle grace. Like the butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day, who presides over a home that embodies the decline of England’s empire, Lucy becomes the head of a household that mirrors Ireland’s unsteady peace. The Irish couple who used to set the Gaults’ table become Lucy’s surrogate family. Once the darling of her village, Lucy becomes its curiosity as she ages. Villagers whisper her story to newcomers behind their hands as she passes. Trevor, in his own way, is telling us this story in the same way — quietly, with an aura of heavy sorrow. There is good reason for this melancholic tone. History has happened to the Gaults — and by extension, to Ireland — and although both the Gaults and Ireland respond with great dignity, there is, Trevor reveals, no redemption for their loss. Even when one of the former terrorists stops by the estate looking for forgiveness in his old age, Lucy thinks to herself: “No meaning dignified his return; no order patterned, as perhaps it might have, past and present; no sense was made of anything.” —JF