A New American Epic

Some books are without precedent; Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex is one of those books. Published in 2002, nine years after his debut novel The Virgin Suicides was released, Middlesex is narrated by Cal Stephanides, a hermaphrodite of Greek descent who is raised as a girl in Grosse Point, Michigan, before undergoing surgery in puberty and living his adult life as a man. Middlesex is a modern epic that spans generations and cultures, and addresses coming of age, sexuality, immigration, and many of the other rifts and conflicts in contemporary American life with humanity and humor. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize in 2003; in 2007, Oprah selected it for her Book Club. On January 15, Arts & Lectures brings Eugenides to Santa Barbara to discuss the book. I spoke with him recently from his new home in Princeton, New Jersey.

You’re teaching at Princeton now – your first real teaching job, is that right? Yes. This is the first time, I mean, I’m a professor now, so it’s the first time I’ve taken an actual teaching position.

How do you find it? The biggest change is that we’ve always lived in big cities – New York, Berlin, Chicago – and now we’re in a small town. I mean, we go to the same bar every time we go to a bar. I might find that congenial, but it’s too early yet to say.