![]() ![]() Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Then comes Cal's story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory. ![]() ![]() ![]() Eugenides spends the book's first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.' "The "me" of that sentence, "Cal" Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. His beautifully written novel begins: "Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. If so, Eugenides ( The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |