Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

EVEN before she's born, Calliope Stephanides's gender is up for debate. Her parents, Milton and Tessie Stephanides of Detroit, want a girl, and a bachelor uncle convinces Milton, ostensibly on the authority of an article in Scientific American magazine, that if the couple have ''sexual congress'' 24 hours prior to ovulation ''the swift male sperm would rush in and die off. The female sperm, sluggish but more reliable, would arrive just as the egg dropped.'' Tessie complies, despite her worries that ''to tamper with something as mysterious and miraculous as the birth of a child was an act of hubris.'' Once Tessie is pregnant, Milton's mother, Desdemona -- a refugee with her husband, Lefty, from a Greek village on the slopes of Mount Olympus -- dangles a silver spoon tied to a string over the belly of her daughter-in-law and pronounces the child a boy. Her son storms in to protest the divination; the baby is a girl, he insists. ''It's science, Ma.''

They're both right, after a fashion. Callie will spend the 1960's and early 70's, the first years of her life, as the relatively unremarkable daughter of an entrepreneurial Greek-American family, only to discover at 14, in the office of a Manhattan physician, that she is a hermaphrodite -- or, more precisely, a pseudohermaphrodite, a sufferer of 5-alpha-reductase deficiency syndrome. ''To the extent that fetal hormones affect brain chemistry and histology, I've got a male brain,'' explains Cal, the man Callie decides to become after she learns the truth and the narrator of ''Middlesex,'' Jeffrey Eugenides's expansive and radiantly generous second novel. ''But I was raised as a girl.''

Eugenides's first novel, ''The Virgin Suicides'' (1993), was a dreamy, slender book about the gulf in understanding between the adolescent boys in a Michigan suburb and the five daughters of a strict Roman Catholic couple living in their neighborhood. The boys fill that gulf with romantic obsession, a beast that thrives in a vacuum, and the girls, stricken with a fatal loneliness, die by their own hands like a bevy of unlucky fairy tale princesses. ''Middlesex'' may be an entirely different sort of book -- it's longer, more discursive and funnier, for a start -- but it's equally preoccupied with rifts. There's the gap between male and female, obviously, but also between Greek and WASP, black and white, the old world and the new, the silver spoon and the sluggish sperm. Finally, there is the tug of war between destiny and free will -- an age-old concern of Greek storytellers, as every college freshman learns, reborn in the theories advanced by evolutionary psychology.

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