Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Just finished rereading this book for the second time. A friend and I recently got to hear Jeffrey Eugenides speak on the writing of Middlesex, so it seemed like a good idea to reread it. If you're looking for quotes I took from the book, try here.

One of the real themes of Eugenides' talk was his concern for being honest with the reader. He disliked writing historically based fiction, because he felt it wasn't 'honest' to pretend he knew what was actually going on at a particular point in time. And, knowing about this concern, it was easy to pick out the places where he clarifies with the reader that he doesn't really know what happened.

And here, I find an echo of his first book, The Virgin Suicides. In TVS, we have our noses rubbed in the fact that we can never really know what is going on in someone else's head. In Middlesex, it is more subtle, but definitely there. And this time, not only can we not know what is going on in someone else's head, we faced with the fact that we can not know what was going on at a different time.