I don't know, maybe I just don't like family sagas, because for me, Middlesex didn't start to really pull until its focus shifted mainly to Cal/Callie themselves, as opposed to his/her family and antecedents (though I see the importance of the family/history aspects given the novel's preoccupation with genetic (in both the broad and the narrow senses of the idea) causes, effects, etc), at which point I began to feel very involved - Eugenides brought me to empathise completely with his unusual narrator, and I think that a lot of that comes down to the way he grounds his main character's experience in some seemingly universal (or, at least, readily recognisable) human narratives, desires and so on. It's not that the family stuff isn't well done - but it just doesn't engage me, or not as much, anyway.
When I read a novel, I want to get a story - stories - from it, but that's not enough to be satisfying...'Story' may not, on its own, be enough, but it's not that 'character' or 'ideas' are either, whether on their own or in conjunction with 'story' (and obviously you can never meaningfully disentangle these various strands). Maybe what I'm trying to get at is that I'm engaged by a sense of narrative consciousness and construction, not necessarily self-reflexively (either on the part of the empirical author or the narrator themselves - which goes as much for third person as for first person writing), of the way that things present themselves (or are presented) to us, us as readers and as characters 'within' the text - that's what I felt began to come through more in the second half of Middlesex that I didn't feel in the earlier stages, even though the events of the plot and interesting characters kept me going through those early sections.
Anyway, obviously that's a bit of a personal predilection...As to other aspects of the novel, the sex-gender aspect is handled with a reasonable degree of sophistication, I felt (and obviously I say that as a former Butler-reader, etc, etc), and I (surprisingly) enjoyed the way that the Greek-ness of the characters was front and centre and felt I learned a bit about the Greek people, if we can ever make these kinds of statements (based on literature or otherwise). Quite enjoyed the drawing out of historical events too. All in all, though, for me, Middlesex is a solid three-out-of-five type book and no more...it just seems to lack some extra indefinable ingredient that I can't express but know when I see it.
(By the way, I'm pretty sure that I've skimmed Middlesex before, because a lot of it felt very familiar and I definitely recognised one or two passages outright. Must have been during my 'not reading books properly phase'...)
