2002's Middlesex's fascinating, singular nature leads it to the Pulitzer Prize

 

This book, Jeffrey Eugenides' follow-up to his similarly acclaimed novel The Virgin Suicides, is a wild read on a couple of levels.

Firstly, let's talk about what would probably be the 2026 elephant in the room, though it's hard to tell if it was in 2002, too. This is a book told largely from the perspective of a young woman named Calliope who, by the end of the book, has finished a transition to a young man named Cal. The "elephant" is that Eugenides doesn't have that perspective. Mind you, he doesn't have the perspective of an ageing Greek grandmother either, but he sure writes it.

That's the thing about this book: it's so well-written that any questions that arise about the author's life experience disappeared in my reading experience. I mean, he sews in a lot of his experience as a Greek-American from Detroit, so the broad, sprawling timeline of the story moves from Greece in the throes of conflict with Turkey, to race-based conflict in the Motor City, as Cal tells generations' worth of stories through some first-hand experience, some first-person accounts, and some piecing together from stories and conjecture.

It tore at my heart so many times and, like the best books that I've read in this project, the end brought a sadness as I said goodbye to characters I genuinely care about.