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a modern classic Without risking overstatement, I think they'll be reading this book in college literature classes for decades to come as an American classic. For certain, it's well-written and carefully constructed, but a classic has something more, something deeper, something almost ineffable. When you finish a classic, you simply know that what you've just read isn't just good but great, isn't just great but classic. I had that feeling when I finished Middlesex. The book is amazingly rich in every way, and there's so much one could discuss. The narration, for example: whether Cal/Calliope can be trusted as a narrator, or how much he has made up or embellished. Or the numerous mythical allusions that add to the book's epic nature. In its look at modern American life and the American "experience," the book is sweeping and grand -- from immigrants to teenagers, Greeks to African Americans, Islam to Orthodox, working class to upper-middle class, birth to death, family to friends. It spans the Great Depression, World War II, the race riots and counterculture of the 60s, and Watergate -- and even extends, with less detail, into the present. At its core, the book is largely about identity: where do we come from, who are we, and why. Do we have to be the way we are? To some extent, yes. Because of genetics, Cal can't be anything but a hermaphrodite. Because of family, history, and tradition, he is -- and can't avoid being -- Greek. But neither DNA nor upbringing need be constrictive. Born with male proclivities but raised as a girl, Cal chooses to be a man. Raised in a fairly traditional, conservative family, he blazes his own unique path, entirely his own but never entirely shorn of his past either. The implications are universal, even if we don't share Cal's genetic abnormalities. I have no complaints about the book. I have a very, very minor quibble with Cal's brother's name, Chapter Eleven. The running joke is never explained, though I assume it has something to do with his running the hot dog stand company into the ground. It was the only thing in the book that struck me as strange -- and that's saying a great deal for a book in which there is so much one could consider weird. Parts were (necessarily?) racy, but on the whole, it was tastefully done, with nothing over the top. Somewhere around page 400, the book felt as though it was dragging just a bit, and I started to think that maybe some of the reviewers were right and the book was too long. But the end snuck up on me, and when I finally finished, I wished there had been another 500 pages.