Putting it all in

Not for nothing has Jeffrey Eugenides, on the strength of just one novel published seven years ago, been cropping up again and again in magazine lists of the top 10 or 25 young novelists in America. He has spent all these years in seclusion in Berlin cooking up a very cunning solution to the notorious literary divide between women’s fiction and men’s fiction: hermaphrodite fiction. A marketing dream. The narrator of Eugenides’ second novel, Middlesex, is a hermaphrodite, and, at least through the second half of the novel, which relates the narrator’s own life, you are sure to find aspects of Eugenides’ hero/heroine with which to identify, no matter what your gender. One minute it’s plucking eyebrows, the next it’s picking up the tab. Calliope Stephanides, as she is christened, introduces her 41-year-old self only briefly at the beginning of the novel, before stretching back across several generations, an ocean and a continent to a small village in Asia Minor, where her grandparents are beginning a beguiling romance.