In That Brave Old World

As Cal informs us fairly early in the story, her paternal grandparents Lefty and Desdemona were siblings and her parents were second cousins. The narrative travels back to the Greek village of Bithynios where Lefty and Desdemona grow up as brother and sister. They escape the village, a raging fire in Smyrna and get on a boat to New York, where they pretend to be strangers and manage to convince the others and themselves that they are just-met lovers.

Flash forward then to Detroit in the late 1930s where we see their son Milton, the future hot-dog king of suburban America, seduce his cousin Tessie with his clarinet.

And then there is the present. Where Cal, a 41-year-old State Department employee, tries to gather enough courage to explain himself to his new girlfriend, the reclusive Julie.

En route, we meet the vulnerable and intelligent Calliope as she grows up in sixties-seventies Detroit, complete with race riots in which Milton is nearly killed. When Milton asks a coloured neighbour, ‘‘What’s the matter with you people?’’ only to be answered, ‘‘The matter with us is you.’’

During her time at Middlesex, the Stephanides family residence in Grosse Pointe, Detroit, Calliope has to cope with her unusual sexuality. These days are described with kindness, empathy and a rare sense of humour (‘‘I did cramps the way Meryl Streep does accents’’). Though nurtured as a girl for the first 14 years of her life, the discovery of her true identity in a Sexual Orders and Gender Identity Clinic in New York makes Calliope choose nature. And Cal is born as the culmination of this tale of the modern day Tiresias.

Euginedes covers a wide canvas in this big book: he covers the generations with the expertise of an Alex Haley, and handles the complexities of physical and genetic freakishness with the dexterity of John Irving. Fortunately for us, his writing style is better than both Haley and Irving. Middlesex, then, is that rare commodity that brings together family, society and the personal in a heady brew. A sprawling and expansive read that unfolds with languid control as one goes along, it is the kind of book that makes you feel glad that there is lots more of the story to go.