How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (24 page)

 

The familiar vividness, if not the uniqueness, of the characters in
Everyman
ends up being a problem. Little of what we know about this everyman comes across as generic or “average”; that the character feels oddly unfinished is surely the result of a struggle between the author's desire to write about an everyman and his natural talent for creating a very specific kind of man, a seethingly interesting male character. The occasional tirades about, say, people who dote on their grandchildren—a sentiment surely more prevalent than not among the population of real-life everymen—feel odd coming from the mouth of a supposedly average person. (Other fraught asides, characterized by a kind of elegiac exhaustion, for instance one about the “corpse-strewn
anni horribiles
that will blacken the memory of the twentieth century,” are equally unpersuasive.) The result is a character whose component parts seem somehow fragmented, unintegrated.

The sense of authorial overdetermination—that certain elements here too transparently serve a preordained theme—persists in another way. From that hernia operation in 1942, when he is nine (the character, like the author, was born in 1933) to his final cardiac arrest, Roth's everyman strikes the reader as a person who seems, if anything, to have enjoyed bizarrely—or perhaps it's “suspiciously”—poor health throughout his life. First the childhood surgery, then, in his thirties, a near-fatal brush with peritonitis following a ruptured appendix; then the onset of heart ailments, the quintuple bypass surgery, followed by the arterial cleanings, the stents, the defibrillators, and so on. A typical passage looks like this:

It's as if, in order to hammer home his theme that each of us is, ultimately, nothing more than a body that fails, the author has abused this one fictional body to unlikely—or at the very least, unusual—extremes. Extremes of physical failure, that is to say, as debilitating as are the extremes of the emotional failure to which we are told this supposedly “average” man has doomed himself. Even the good daughter, with whom at the end of his life he dreams of living, ends up living with her mother instead. At the end of his life, this man is utterly, if somewhat artificially, improbably, alone.

 

Roth is so eager to leave his allegedly average hero with nothing to hold on to by the end of his story—no body, no family—because his mission here is reductive in every sense of the word: for him, we're nothing but bodies, in the end, and we know what happens to those. (At one point the hero sourly declares that if he were to write an autobiography, it would be called
The Life and Death of a Male Body
.) The final third of the book is little more than a catalog of health crises, both the hero's and his friends': in rapid succession, you hear about the dreadful demises or debilitations of three of his former colleagues and the nice ex-wife. The relentless and ultimately numbing repetition again suggests a wounded outrage on the part of the author; and yet the character is so undefined that the awful departures of his onetime wives, relations, and friends (of “Kindred,” that is to say, and “Fellowship”) carry little emotional weight. But then, the author's denial to his character of the solace of emotional ties serves his larger, bleak theme. A closing and climactic confrontation with a gravedigger—
Lear
has been abandoned for
Hamlet
here—places great emphasis on the hero's desire for the comfort not of intangible abstractions but of “concreteness”: knowing how a grave is dug, knowing what happens down there.

The opposition between concreteness and abstraction (and, naturally, between everything those two could be expected to stand for in a novel: the material and the spiritual, the body and the soul, the profane and the sacred) informs a suggestive if underdeveloped subplot, a passage of a few pages that hints at how interesting this book might have been if it had told us more. In his retirement, the hero, a skilled amateur painter, decides to teach an art course in the retirement community, located on the Jersey Shore, to which he's moved. Here, his overeager but naive students dream of painting glorious abstract paintings—a genre in which he himself is skilled, we learn, although he eventually abandons it, having lost confidence in his talent; they resent the still lifes he requires them to paint. “I don't want to do flowers or fruit,” a student says, “I want to do abstraction like yours.” (It's hard here not to recall the French term for still life:
nature morte
, “dead nature.”)

To such students our everyman approvingly repeats a remark made by the painter Chuck Close, that “amateurs look for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” As if to drive home the notion that
only concrete objects and solid values—flowers, fruit, hard work—matter in the end, we learn that the one pupil who has any talent ends up killing herself, unable to cope with her chronic back pain—something that isn't abstract at all. So much, it would seem, for the triumph of art over life.

 

The pervasive, strangely intense, almost angry insistence that the abstractions with which we normally comfort ourselves—emotional, spiritual, artistic—amount to little in the face of our common and none-too-pleasant fate, which is the bitter failure of the flesh of which we are made, flies, of course, in the face of the redemptive action of that other, antique drama called
Everyman
. In Roth's book the hero is someone who “put no stock in an afterlife and knew without a doubt that God was a fiction and this was the only life he'd have,” and so is left, at the end, with nothing but bones, which as he sees it is all that survives of us in the end. “The flesh melts away but the bones endure,” he thinks during a final visit to the graves of his parents, with whom he carries on a moving silent conversation:

That this flare-up of emotional intensity is directed at what the character knows to be nothing more than hard, white bones is no accident: throughout the book he has yearned for something that is truly concrete, something that will last. “Imperishable,” indeed, is a word we're told he loves. At one point he asks his Danish mistress, soon to become the disastrous third wife, to translate it into her native tongue; more significantly, we learn that his father loved using that very word of the small diamonds he once sold to his working-class clientele. “A
piece of the earth that is imperishable, and a mere mortal is wearing it on her hand!” The contrast between the mortal and the immortal, the perishable flesh and the imperishable piece of earth, which recurs with greatest effect in the cemetery scene, is meant to be a poignant one.

But in the end, Roth's relentless reduction of his hero to nothing but failed relationships and failed flesh doesn't move—and worse, doesn't persuade. For all the novel's intensity—and despite the chillingly clinical descriptions of what happens when “eluding death” becomes the “central business” of one's life—you don't really believe it. The fact that Roth's anonymous hero ends up “lost in nothing” both emotionally and, finally, physically says more about the way this particular narrative has been manipulated, and about the author's bitterness about mortality just now, than it does about the condition of being a human being. The vast preponderance of evidence, after all, suggests that in the face of death people do, in fact, cling happily and successfully to the familiar abstractions—love, family, art, religion.
The Dying Animal
claimed to look death in the face, but wriggled out of the confrontation: its aging-satyr hero was saved while his voluptuous young mistress got breast cancer. (Another victory for the boys.)
Everyman
claims to look death in the face as well, but, by concentrating too narrowly, only on the physical, only on the materiality of our passage from life, he ends up drawing an equally unfinished picture of what it's like when Death comes calling.

And indeed, just as his allegedly ordinary hero can't help being a vividly Rothian type, it's hard not to see, creeping into Roth's annihilating pessimism here, an irrepressible sentimentality. What, after all, does it mean to commune with the bones of one's parents in a cemetery—a communication that involves not only the hero talking to them, but them talking
back
—if not that we like to believe in transcendence, believe that there is, in fact, something more to our experience than just the concrete, just the bones, just the bits of earth? If the scene is moving, I suspect it's because of the nakedness with which it exposes a regressive fantasy that seems to belong to the author as much as to his main character: once again, Roth reserves his best writing and profoundest emotion for the character's relationship with his parents. This reversion to the emotional comforts of childhood seems to me to be connected to the deep nostalgia that characterizes this latest period of Roth's writing
(it's at the core of
The Plot Against America
, too); it seems to be something that Roth himself is aware of, too, and which, in a moment that is moving in ways he might not have intended, his everyman articulates. “But how much time could a man spend remembering the best of boyhood?” the protagonist of
Everyman
muses during a sentimental trip to the New Jersey shore town he visited as a boy. It's a question some readers may be tempted to ask, too.

As it happens, the culminating scene in the graveyard also recalls a sentiment—a redemptive one—expressed in the original
Everyman
. There, in a triumphant concluding passage, Knowledge suggests that out of death can come beauty—and art. “Now hath he made ending. Methinketh that I hear angels sing, and make great joy and melody….” Roth's new book, as imperfect as it is impassioned, spends a lot of time arguing violently against such sentimentality, such aesthetic abstraction; but ends up suggesting in spite of itself that, whatever else is true, it's the ending that everyone, himself included, prefers.

—The New York Review of Books,
June 8, 2006

T
hose Greeks and their hermaphrodites! Teiresias, the seer who futilely haunts so many Greek tragedies, was one. Having enjoyed the special privilege of living as both a male and a female, he was asked by the gods to settle an argument about which of the two sexes had more pleasure from lovemaking; on asserting that the female did, he was struck blind by prudish Hera—but given the gift of prophecy by Zeus as a compensation. The minor deity Hermaphroditus, of course, was another, appearing in religion (there is evidence of dedications to the god as early as the third century
B.C
. in Attica), in literature (Ovid, in the fourth book of the
Metamorphoses
, elaborates the mythic narrative in which this son of Hermes and Aphrodite was joined in one body with the nymph Salmacis), and in art, where the opportunities for imaginative representations of this strange creature proved irresistible, predictably enough, to Hellenistic sculptors, with their penchant for the extreme.

The most famous of these sculpted hermaphrodites is a Greek one from about 150
B.C
., which survives in Roman copies such as the one to be found in the “Hermaphrodite Room” in the Uffizi. At first glance, the figure seems to be that of a sleeping woman. She lies facedown, and
is quite voluptuous: her breasts, pressed against the couch on which she reclines, are full, as are her hips. Her hair is carefully, fashionably coiffed. On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary female. For there, peeking out of the voluminous folds of her gown, is a penis, as modest and perfectly formed as any of the unassuming members familiar from countless classical nudes. Male nudes, that is.

To this catalogue we may now add another Greek, Calliope Stephanides, the heroine—and later the hero (“Cal”)—of Jeffrey Eugenides' second novel, which is slyly entitled
Middlesex
. The title ostensibly refers to the name of the street in Grosse Pointe, Michigan (a state that is itself a “middle”), where much of the novel is set; but of course, it's really about another kind of middle altogether. For adorable little Callie turns out, by the novel's end, to be a boy—one who suffers from a rare genetic disorder that causes a type of male pseudohermaphroditism. Although chromosomally male (she has both an X and a Y), she has no real penis, but instead a kind of extended clitoris which she will refer to as “the crocus”; she has testes, but they remain undescended. As a result of this she is misidentified at birth as being a girl and is raised as a girl by her amusingly neurotic, upper-middle-class Greek-American parents. Until puberty, that is, when her male hormones kick in and it becomes increasingly evident that she is no ordinary female. (For one thing, she doesn't menstruate, although she tries mightily to fake it: “I did cramps the way Meryl Streep does accents.”) It is only after a road accident lands her in an emergency room that Callie and her bewildered family realize how extraordinary she really is.
Middlesex
, then, is a
Bildungsroman
with a rather big twist: the
Bildung
it describes turns out to be the wrong one—a false start.

From Ovid to Gore Vidal, hermaphroditism and bisexuality have provided writers with irresistible occasions to comment on both Nature and Culture. Eugenides—whose small, nearly perfect first novel,
The Virgin Suicides
, reflected a Greek tragic sensibility, with its chorus-like first-person-plural narration and its self-immolating young heroines, like something out of Euripides—is well aware of the opportunities his choice of subject has afforded. (In the new novel, the author's allusions to the—his—Greek literary heritage tend to be on the jokey side, consisting of mock-epic invocations of the Muses: “Sing, Muse, of Greek
ladies and their battle against unsightly hair!” and so on.) The tension between who Callie is raised to be and who Cal ends up being, between his early life as a girl and his subsequent life as a man, is clearly an occasion for musing upon all kinds of bimorphisms and dualities. Among these are: the ironies of being a “hyphenated” American of recent vintage (“In America, England is where you go to wash yourself of ethnicity”: so observes a sardonic Callie, the big-nosed, dark-haired child of first-generation Greek-Americans, who ends up attending a Waspy private girls' school); the horrors of racial conflict (a major set piece of the novel takes place during the 1967 Detroit race riots); and, indeed, the entire global geopolitical picture. Reminiscing about his family's reaction to the 1974 Cyprus crisis, the adult Cal, who ends up a career diplomat stationed in Berlin, remarks knowingly that now Cyprus was “like Berlin, like Korea, like all the other places in the world that were no longer one thing or the other.” Elsewhere, he ruefully observes that both he and the once-torn city are seeking “unification…
Einheit
.”

And yet
Einheit
is what
Middlesex
itself ultimately lacks. Eugenides' novel seems itself to be composed of two distinct and occasionally warring halves. One part has to do with hermaphrodites—with Callie's condition, and how she comes to discover what she “really” is. The other, far more successful part has to do with Greeks—and, in a way, Greekness. Far more colorful than the story of what Callie is, is the story of how she came to be that way—the story of why this child came to inherit the exceedingly rare and fateful gene that ends up defining her indefinable life. This story, the real heart of the novel, is an old-fashioned family saga—as full of incest, violence, and terrible family secrets that make themselves felt from one generation to the next as anything you find in Sophocles, a junior high school performance of whose
Antigone
plays, indeed, a crucial role in the plot. Needless to say, Callie gets cast as Teiresias.

 

Everything in
Middlesex
that has to do with the (to say the least) eccentric Stephanides clan is lively and original, fulfilling the promise of
The Virgin Suicides
nearly a decade ago. It's a measure of Eugenides' self-confidence that he spills the novel's most sensational secret—that Callie's paternal grandparents, Desdemona and Eleutherios (“Lefty”)
Stephanides, are actually brother and sister—early on. To his credit, if the incest theme holds your attention, it's not so much because it's the key to Callie's genetic inheritance as because of the unusually understated way that the author handles it. The opening pages of Eugenides' book, with its description of the young Desdemona's and Lefty's claustrophobic lives in a tiny Anatolian village near Smyrna in the early 1920s, are so tenderly rendered as to make this strange love seem natural. Orphaned during the Greco-Ottoman violence that culminated in the 1922 Turkish massacre of the Greeks of Smyrna, the voluptuous, fiercely proper Desdemona and her jaunty younger brother (who uncomprehendingly warbles American pop tunes as he gets dressed in the morning) are left alone to tend the family's silk farm on the slopes of a mountain overlooking Bursa, the ancient Ottoman capital. With considerable delicacy and not a little humor—Cal's narrative voice is rather jaunty throughout—Eugenides explores the ferocity that can characterize the feelings that siblings living in isolated places have for each other. (“Lefty was one year younger than Desdemona and she often wondered how she'd survived those first twelve months without him.”)

Here as elsewhere in the novel—and here more successfully than elsewhere—Eugenides weaves one family's story into that of a whole nation. As the brother and sister try to resist the storm of passion that has seized them, the storm clouds of war gather around them. Their efforts at resisting each other are, occasionally, comic: an increasingly desperate Desdemona futilely gives beauty tips to the only other marriageable girls in the village, hoping they'll look more attractive to a disdainful Lefty, who spends his time in the brothels of Bursa, choosing girls who have his sister's dark braids and full figure. But incest turns out to be the least of their worries. In these vivid opening pages the author recalls, not without a wry bitterness that is almost a genetic inheritance of many younger descendants of certain Greek immigrants, the Greek government's ill-fated plan to reclaim its ancient Anatolian territories—the scheme known as the
Megala Idea
, the “Big Idea.” That scheme notoriously ended in disaster for the Hellenes: it helped the triumphant rise of Ataturk and, in 1922, culminated in the Turkish army's burning of Smyrna and the murder of over one hundred thousand of that city's Greek inhabitants—an event that provides this first of the novel's four main sections with its unforgettable and brilliantly narrated set piece.
The carnage of the Smyrna cataclysm is, moreover, skillfully woven into the Stephanides saga: for it becomes a cover for the two orphaned siblings to consummate their long-burning lust for each other, and to emigrate as man and wife.

Many of the pleasures to be had from Eugenides' book are the pleasures to be had from any good immigrant family novel. For the first two hundred of Eugenides' five-hundred-plus pages, you're so absorbed in the saga of the Stephanideses' attempt to establish themselves in their new country that you're tempted to forget that this is all, in its way, preamble—an elaborate explication of how Callie came to inherit her special gene. These richly emotional—and, often, richly comic—pages move, in classic European immigrant–literature fashion, both geographically westward and economically upward. Interwoven with sardonic, fashionably postmodern commentary by the grown-up Cal, the plot follows Lefty and Desdemona from their arrival at Ellis Island (“A least it's a woman,” Desdemona says, warily eyeing the Statue of Liberty. “Maybe here people won't be killing each other every single day”), to their journey west to Detroit. There, their first cousin Sourmalina, a thoroughly Americanized young woman with some secrets of her own—she was kicked out of the village after being found in a compromising position with a married woman—awaits them. She is the only person to whom they ever confess their terrible secret, using her own past as leverage.

 

Eugenides' sprawling narrative continues on from the birth of Desdemona and Lefty's son, Miltiades (Milt), who will become Callie's father, through the Depression (Lefty's brief career as a gangster ends when Prohibition ends and he becomes a popular barkeep). It gradually shifts focus to Milt and his youth and young adulthood during the Second World War, lingering on his fanciful courtship of Sourmalina's daughter Tessie, whom he eventually marries (he charms her with his clarinet-playing, and then with his clarinet itself, which he places against various parts of her body as he plays); then it shifts from the loss of Milt's first business during the 1967 Detroit race riots to his founding—partly by means of an insurance settlement after the riots—of a successful restaurant chain that brings him thoroughly American success while
invoking his ethnic past. (The chain is called “Hercules Hot Dogs.”) And so the story goes on, shifting finally to Callie herself, as she grows up and, during yet another Turkish invasion—the 1974 Cyprus crisis—discovers the mystery of her own identity. (Not all of the author's attempts to pin family history to national history work: two long sections about the Stephanides family's dealings with blacks—and, by extension, about America's race problems—come off as preachy and rather nervous. The seven-year-old Callie's observations that the 1967 riots are “nothing less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution” stretch credulity to the breaking point.)

It's hard not to feel, as you make your way through this often engrossing and fluently narrated saga, that the Stephanideses' story is the story that Eugenides really wants to tell—a story of Greek immigrants as only one who has hungrily absorbed such stories from birth can retell them. This narrative is populated by memorable characters who have all the hard, unexpected contours of real people: Lefty, struck dumb by a stroke, meticulously translating Sappho every day, smoking hashish and listening to
rebetika
albums in his attic room while communicating with his family by means of a chalkboard; the ferocious and self-consciously “self-made” Milt, arguing politics with the Marxist girlfriend that Callie's older brother brings home from college during the Sixties (“Well, if giving somebody a job is exploiting them, then I guess I'm an exploiter”); Uncle Mike, the Orthodox priest who's married to Milt's sister but loves Tessie; Tessie herself, anxious and ever hopeful that her daughter will finally start menstruating. Eugenides gives these characters authentic voices that rescue them from being adorable caricatures—always a danger with immigrant stories. Indeed, perhaps because they are voices the author has heard, these ring true in a way that Callie's, and Cal's, never does.

This author has a remarkably good ear for the rhythms not only of immigrant speech, but of immigrant thought. The elderly, bleakly fatalistic Desdemona's pleasure in commercials for detergents, with their “animating scrubbing bubbles and avenging suds,” tells you more about her particular brand of grim Puritanism—the prudishness of a woman who has lived most of her life burdened with secret guilt—than five pages of earnest psychologizing could. You have no problem believing that this is a woman who, when vexed by a family member—as when,
for instance, her son, Milt, decides that he won't have the infant Callie baptized—starts fanning herself furiously with one of the very special fans that she collects: