From the back cover:
With wonderful delicacy and subtle insight and intimation, McCabe creates Mr. Patrick “Puss” Braden, the enduringly and endearingly hopeful hero(ine) whose gutsy survival and yearning quest for love resonate in and drive the glimmering, agonizing narrative in which the Troubles are a distant and immediate echo and refrain.

Twenty years ago, her ladyship escaped her hometown of Tyreelin, Ireland, fleeing her foster mother Whiskers—prodigious Guinness-guzzler, human chimney—and her mad household, to begin a new life in London. There, in blousey tops and satin miniskirts, she plies her trade, often risking life and limb amongst the flotsam and jetsam that fill the bars of Piccadilly Circus. But suave businessmen and lonely old women are not the only dangers that threaten Puss. It is the 1970s and fear haunts the streets of London and Belfast as the critical mass of history builds up, and Puss is inevitably drawn into a maelstrom of violence and tragedy destined to blow his fragile soul asunder.

Note: Patrick’s nickname actually has a ‘y’ on the end. It’s been changed here to avoid getting lumped in with any naughty stuff filters my employer might have in their arsenal.

Review:
I listened to the unabridged audio of this, read by the author. I highly recommend it. In addition to wonderful Irish and English accents, who better to properly interpret the speech mannerisms of Puss, which are integral to this particular character? She mixes gleeful naughty bits (which I might’ve found gross were they not said with endearing silliness) with old-fashioned turns of phrase (ex: ‘When words with Charlie on the phone she did swap…’) to create a lilting, storytelling style.

Puss does quite a few dumb things in the course of the stories she relates, which she fully admits, but she’s so incredibly easy to sympathize with, it doesn’t get annoying. Mostly, it’s just relentlessly sad. I did find it a little hard to pinpoint a timeline for a while, since some elements are told out of sequence, but happily report that it’s clear by the end.

If you’re looking for a titillating book about cross-dressing, this isn’t it. It’s more about the search for warm family love and a place to belong than anything else. All the IRA stuff takes a definite back seat to this more basic concern.

From the back cover:
Middlesex tells the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides, and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of 1967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret, and the astonishing genetic history that turns Calliope into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Review:
I don’t normally go in for multi-generational family epics, and I still think the basic concept is a boring one, but in Middlesex it’s handled in such a way that it’s all leading up to some revelations made in the first paragraph and explains how they came about. About halfway in or so when I discovered I was enjoying the sprawling epic, I looked it up and found that it had won the Pulitzer Prize for literature. I think it’s well-deserved in this case.

Although I do own a paperback copy of Middlesex, I actually listened to an unabridged audio recording read by Kristoffer Tabori, who was excellent. The language is not exactly florid, but it is pretty detail-rich. It might’ve been annoying to me if I were looking at it on a page, but Tabori adopts a storyteller mien that makes all the description seem necessary to convey the proper atmosphere.

There are a few things that keep this from getting an A+, however. There are two characters who receive quirky nicknames, which can come off as just a little pretentious. When Calliope’s brother is called Chapter Eleven in the first chapter, it totally elicited a groan from me, because I generally hate books that do stuff like that. It is eventually explained, but it just seems a little look-at-me clever. Also, there’s a bit of a plot hole at the end.

So, a plain ol’ A it is. Get the unabridged audio if you can.