Middlesex defies easy classification. In some ways, it’s a bildungsroman, as Callie comes of age and discovers a new identity as Cal. In other ways, it manifests itself as a family saga, depicting the travels and travails of multiple generations of the Stephanides clan, which intertwines with Cal’s story. In many ways, the book reads as an historical novel, full of international events and sociocultural commentary. Like Henry Fielding’s The History of Tom Jones or Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex uses a picaresque narrator whose exploits take place on the grand stage of history and whose self-identity is the product of those contentious forces. Cal Stephanides isn’t merely a character; he’s the symbolic culmination of the American immigrant story.

Part 1 takes place in the context of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the ensuing Greco-Turkish wars. If not for the deaths and displacement caused by these conflicts, the Stephanides siblings might not have immigrated to the US—and almost certainly wouldn’t have married. The author includes historical background to reveal the forces that led to mass migration, even during earlier times: “People had begun leaving in 1913, when the phylloxera blight ruined the currants.