Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered by story, I need them more than ever.

But Eugenides, through the voice of the unforgettable Callope Stephanides, does find the right words. Over and over again.

The artichoke heart of the 500-page-plus novel only gets going after page 400. It's as if Eugenides thought of a clever story to tell, but then decided to prepend it with 400 pages of prologue. 400 pages of very enjoyable prologue. In the end he's able to weave together a tapestry of events that begins in Turkey before it was Turkey, takes us to the birth of the automobile era in Detroit, puts us into the passenger seat for some prohibition bootlegging, into the heart of the Nation of Islam before Malcolm X even existed, into folk tales of Chinese princesses and silk worms, and ends with transgendered underwater sex shows in San Francisco.

And, yet, what we're talking about here is a hermaphrodite's coming of age story in the epitome of American suburbia, Grosse Point, Michigan, where Eugenides himself went to a private prep school just like Calliope. Much of the book can feel like drawn out suspense until the moment when he finds out she's a he, but throughout the story there is a build-up of allusions to the book's most central thesis: that how we decide our gender, just like almost everything else, is both biological and social. Sure, some of us have Y chromosomes and others do not, but that's not the sole determinant of our gender identity. (And if that sentence has you scared that this is required reading for feminazi classes at liberal arts colleges, it's not that kind of book.)

What impressed me the most about the writing is its gender neutrality. Despite the fact that the author of the book is male - as is the narrator - I often thought of the narration as neither male nor female. As if the writing itself - like Cal - somehow transcended the very concept of gender. This is one of those books I'd like to give 4.5 stars, but since I'm feeling charitable we'll round up.