It's easy to imagine Cal's story being more isolated and condensed. The novel could have just focused on his development and personal issues with a mere summary of the grandparents sufficient to explain the genetic mutation that shaped Cal's life. Instead, Eugenides chose to write a sweeping, panoramic portrait of a fictional family and a real city.
A couple of passages stood out to me in regard to this.
One is where Callie is talking about how she routinely lied to Dr. Luce, who, significantly, she says was the first person to encourage her writing. He didn't know, of course, that I was making up most of what I wrote, pretending to be the all-American daughter my parents wanted me to be. I fictionalized early "sex play" and later crushes on boys; I transferred my feelings for the Object onto Jerome and it was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.(p. 418)
This last sentence gave me pause, because it made me briefly question the veracity of the narrator, and I wondered whether the interweaving of real history into the story was meant to be the tiny bit of truth that would (cleverly!) make credible the "lies" of the book. Did you have any reaction to that passage?
Another passage that struck me as telling in relation to the structure of the novel was this: ...living sends a person not into the future but back into the past, to childhood and before birth, finally, to commune with the dead. You get older, you puff on the stairs, you enter the body of your father. From there it's only a quick jump to your grandparents, and then before you know it you're time-traveling. In this life we grow backwards. It's always the gray-haired tourists on Italian buses who can tell you something about the Etruscans.(p. 425)
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I made note of those passages, too!
I think part of the brilliance of this book was that connectedness with the past, the panoramic portrait, as you say. One of my favorite scenes was when the story comes full circle at the end, when Desdemona tells Cal about her long-hidden secret, the secret that drove the course of Cal's life. The beauty of that scene is what we know about Desdemona, about her hopes and fears, about the love and desperation that led her to make that choice so many years ago.
"the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies"
This line didn't make me question the narrator, whose story I basically accepted as true -- although clearly embellished and imagined in some areas. The line is quite wonderful, though, and so true.
I loved the ending scene with Desdemona, too! I love how she was vindicated in her gender prediction.
It's so sad that she was never able to make peace with her relationship to Lefty, that she couldn't just love him and enjoy him as a partner, that she was always tormented by guilt.
Did you think Desdemona would eventually "forget" that Lefty was her brother? Were you surprised that she never did?
No, I wasn't surprised about that. With Desdemona's personality -- the way she fretted and worried and wouldn't let anything go -- I figured she would let it haunt her forever. I also think keeping something like that a secret can be harder on a person than just getting it out in the open.
How could you ever forget that you were married to your brother? Sheez. That is one of the toughest "facts" of the story for me. I found myself thankful that Milton died before he ever found out. Imagine finding that out about your parents.
I am confused about the question of the narrators truthiness. I never even thought to question it. Educate me, its fiction so how do we decide if he is telling a "true" story. The point of the story is that it reveals to us something deeper than factual truth.
But maybe I'm reading that question through the lens of how we find truth in things like the biblical story.
Well, I certainly could never be married to MY brother. That's for damn sure.
Regarding the truthiness question, I think a narrator could be more or less reliable in the context of the work. Sometimes we might be able to detect this, because what he or she says may be at odds with some other clue in the text. Sometimes we know a narrator is embellishing because he couldn't possibly have knowledge of what he writes (we have a lot of this with Cal, and it's up to us whether to believe him). Sometimes a first-person narrator is suspect because he has an interest in casting himself in the best possible light. We may not always have the means to find them out on these things, but that's what I was getting at.
Okay, makes sense to me. But isn't there a difference between a narrator retelling and embellishing things she/he could have known (like different versions of the same car accident) and a perspective like Cal's? With him we are taken far afield of his possible knowledge, like pre-womb where he and Chapter Eleven are in the cosmic ether together.
How would it change the reading of the book to find him unreliable?
My impression is that our narrator is reliable in the end, but it still may be an open question with any first-person narrator ...
Have you read "Notes on a Scandal"? Now that book, to me, has some heavy-duty questions about the narrator's veracity.
I HAVEN'T read that book! But I did watch the movie. Who is the narrator? Dame Judy Dench? Er, Barbara? That is a story all about deception, I can see where the narrator would be questionable.
Yes, Barbara is the narrator, and the book is a heck of a lot better than the movie!
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