Middlesex: Book Two

by Jeffrey Eugenides
This Pulitzer Prize-winning novel traces the story of a Greek family for three generations.

Here are links to our lists for the novel: Book One, Book Two, Book Three, Book Four
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. expediency
    the quality of being suited to the end in view
    Detroit, on the other hand, was an American city and therefore dedicated to money, and so design had given way to expediency.
  2. manifest
    a document listing the contents put on a ship or plane
    Pinned with numbers from the Giulia's manifest, they’d filed past a line of health inspectors who’d looked in their eyes and ears, rubbed their scalps, and flipped their eyelids inside out with buttonhooks.
  3. cajole
    influence or urge by gentle urging, caressing, or flattering
    In the concessions area at Ellis Island, Lefty had cajoled Desdemona to step into a tent run by the YWCA.
  4. abound
    exist in large quantities
    The United States abounded with dollar bills, baseball sluggers, raccoon coats, diamond jewelry—and lonely, immigrant bachelors.
  5. manipulate
    hold something in one's hands and move it
    Sourmelina had written often, describing her new life in America, but she concentrated on the new fashions, or her Aeriola Jr., the radio she spent hours each day listening to, wearing earphones and manipulating the dial, stopping every so often to clean off the carbon dust that built up on the crystal.
    The verb also means "influence or control shrewdly or deviously." This meaning does not fit the example sentence's description of how Sourmelina handles the radio dial, but it could fit how she handles her husband. Zizmo treats Lina more like a daughter than a wife, which she prefers, since she prefers women to men. The fact that Zizmo was older, shorter, and uglier than his picture did not bother her at all because he was her ticket to a new life in America.
  6. teeming
    abundantly filled with especially living things
    What they didn’t see were the workers sleeping on the streets because of the housing shortage, and the ghetto just to the east, a thirty-square-block area bounded by Leland, Macomb, Hastings, and Brush streets, teeming with the city’s African Americans, who weren’t allowed to live anywhere else.
    Compare with "abound" in this list--both words connect to abundance, but as the example sentences suggest, "abound" is often used to describe things that people want lots of, while "teeming" is often used to describe too much of something that people would rather not be exposed to (the participial adjective was also used earlier to describe sweatshops).
  7. jovial
    full of or showing high-spirited merriment
    Soon the jovial mood dissipated and the languages fell silent.
  8. simultaneously
    at the same instant
    Simultaneously, other men are unhooking parts from adjacent conveyors—the carburetor, the distributor, the intake manifold—and connecting them to the engine block.
  9. adjacent
    near or close to but not necessarily touching
    Every evening at quitting time my exhausted grandfather would come out of the factory and tramp across to an adjacent building housing the Ford English School.
  10. concoction
    any foodstuff made by combining different ingredients
    Desdemona went up and down the line, adding walnuts, butter, honey, spinach, cheese, adding more layers of dough, then more butter, before forging the assembled concoctions in the oven.
    The parallel descriptions of Lefty in the factory and Desdemona at home show how both are working hard to build a new life in America. But in the factory, the assembly line divides the work, while at home, Desdemona is the only one responsible for her concoctions. Their life is also built on another meaning of "concoction": "the invention of a scheme or story to suit some purpose" (compare with "fabricate" in the list for Book One).
  11. vermin
    any of various small animals or insects that are pests
    He writes R-A-T before throwing his pencil at the vermin.
  12. multifarious
    having many aspects
    My grandfather, accustomed to the multifarious conjugations of ancient Greek verbs, had found English, for all its incoherence, a relatively simple tongue to master.
  13. rectitude
    righteousness as a consequence of being honorable and honest
    “Management has foreseen,” the short one seamlessly continued, “that five dollars a day in the hands of some men might work a tremendous handicap along the paths of rectitude and right living and might make of them a menace to society in general.”
  14. feasible
    capable of being done with means at hand
    I’m going to recommend that you and Mrs. Stephanides move into your own home as soon as it is financially feasible.
    Owning a home is a dream of many Americans. For most, it is not financially feasible. For newly arrived immigrants, it is often not emotionally feasible because they need the support of their American relatives. The recommendation is more insulting than helpful here because it comes from a company that pays five dollars a day and threatens not to pay at all if they find, after an invasive home visit, that the employee might not use the money "advisedly and conservatively."
  15. emblazon
    decorate, adorn, or inscribe with a design
    A gangway extends into the stage’s other focal point: a giant gray cauldron emblazoned with the words FORD ENGLISH SCHOOL MELTING POT.
  16. apprehension
    fearful expectation or anticipation
    He looks around with apprehension and then descends into the melting pot.
    "Apprehension" also means "the cognitive condition of someone who understands." This meaning does not apply to the example sentence, nor to Lefty who is proud of "feeling thoroughly American." But it applies to Zizmo, who murmured during the show, "What propaganda." It somewhat applies to Desdemona, whose stunned look comes from realizing that something is wrong with the sight of her husband being tangled up in a crowded pot of men being churned around by spoons.
  17. beneficence
    the quality of being kind or helpful or generous
    In their beneficence they allowed a certain amount of amateur smuggling to go on—the day trips to Canada, the fishing boats out for a midnight cruise.
  18. commodious
    large and roomy
    The Packard’s trunk could fit four cases of liquor, its commodious, curtained backseat eight more.
  19. dowry
    money brought by a woman to her husband at marriage
    “They don’t have dowries in America, Desdemona.”
    This is Lina's response to Desdemona's point that raising a daughter would be too much trouble because of worries about boys and a dowry. A dowry system can devalue girls by placing a monetary value on them that families might not be able to pay. Ironically, although Lina agrees with the point, she actually benefited from the dowry system in Bithynios because it allowed her father to respectably pay a man to take her to America.
  20. eccentric
    conspicuously or grossly unconventional or unusual
    Though he learned to speak a fluent, somewhat eccentric English, his written command of the language was mediocre at best.
  21. iniquity
    morally objectionable behavior
    But as Milton was cleansed of original sin, Desdemona remained cognizant of her iniquity.
  22. grotto
    a small cave, usually with attractive features
    Then they descended out of the America of factory work and tyrannical foremen into an Arcadian grotto of forgetfulness.
    As the structure of the sentence emphasizes, America and Arcadia are described as contrasting places. Arcadia is an actual region in Greece that is the mythological home of Pan, the god associated with nature, nymphs, and music. In his basement speakeasy called the Zebra Room, Lefty tries to create a wild cave so that his customers could forget the factories and foremen of America.
  23. exuberance
    joyful enthusiasm
    He greeted people with the exuberance they expected from a foreigner and he flirted with the ladies.
  24. attribute
    a quality belonging to or characteristic of an entity
    Down in that basement speakeasy, my grandfather acquired the attributes of the barkeep he would be for the rest of his life.
  25. despair
    a state in which all hope is lost or absent
    Their lemming-like despair seemed far away from Hurlbut Street, but little by little the dark cloud passed over the nation, moving in the opposite direction to the weather, until it reached the Midwest.
  26. ultimatum
    a final peremptory demand
    And this terrible new face delivered an ultimatum: “Tomorrow morning,” Lefty spat, “you’re going to go get a job.”
  27. forlorn
    marked by or showing hopelessness
    The gloom of front porches and apartments without electricity seeped out into the streets, and the thundercloud of poverty that hung over the neighborhood directed attention downward toward the clarity of forlorn, shadowless objects: red bricks crumbling off a stoop, piles of trash and ham bones, used tires, crushed pinwheels from last year’s fair, someone’s old lost shoe.
    Compare with "despair" in this list--both words connect to hopelessness. "Lemming-like despair" describes Wall Street businessmen who had lost their fortunes in the 1929 stock market crash and were following each other off skyscrapers. The "forlorn, shadowless objects" belong to a neighborhood whose outward poverty makes Desdemona wonder why the people are so full of life and laughter.
  28. inexorable
    impervious to pleas, persuasion, requests, or reason
    Over the years, Black Bottom, for all the whites’ attempts to contain it—and because of the inexorable laws of poverty and racism—would slowly spread, street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood, until the so-called ghetto would become the entire city itself, and by the 1970s, in the no-tax-base, white-flight, murder-capital Detroit of the Coleman Young administration, black people could finally live wherever they wanted to.
  29. foment
    try to stir up
    One rumor maintained that he was a Palestinian Arab who had fomented racial unrest in India, South Africa, and London before moving to Detroit.
  30. subservience
    abject or cringing submissiveness
    Women exchanged the maids’ uniforms of subservience for the white chadors of emancipation.
  31. derogatory
    expressive of low opinion
    She passed the box around, telling the story of its travels, how her grandfather had carved it from olivewood and how it had survived a fire, and she managed to do all this without saying anything derogatory about the students’ co-religionists.
  32. shrivel
    decrease in size, range, or extent
    Hatching from their black eggs, they detected the dry, indoor air and the false sun of the lightbulbs, and began to shrivel up.
  33. charlatan
    a flamboyant deceiver
    “He’s just a charlatan,” she said.
  34. compose
    make calm or quiet
    “You don’t know me!” he shouts. “You never knew me!” Then, composing himself: “You never knew who I was or where I came from.”
  35. disconsolate
    causing dejection
    He raised the hat in a gesture that took in the entire neighborhood, the ghetto with its shantytown porches, unpaved streets, and disconsolate laundry.
  36. arsenal
    a place where arms are manufactured
    The Motor City, which hasn’t been dubbed Motown yet, becomes for a time the “Arsenal of Democracy.”
  37. exultation
    a feeling of extreme joy
    Before Dukakis climbed up on that armored vehicle, before he took off his J. Press suit and put on those army fatigues, we all felt—I speak for my fellow Greek Americans, whether they want me to or not—a sense of exultation.
  38. precision
    the quality of being exact
    The U.S. Navy was responsible for the precision with which Milton Stephanides ever after parted his hair, his habit of polishing his belt buckle with his shirt sleeve, his “yes, sir”s and “shipshape”s, and his insistence on making us synchronize our watches at the mall.
  39. assiduous
    marked by care and persistent effort
    Despite my grandfather’s assiduous drink-refilling and counter-wiping, the bar on Pingree Street had lost its luster.
  40. distinctive
    of a feature that helps to identify a person or thing
    Hercules Hot Dogs™, which at its height would boast sixty-six locations throughout Michigan, Ohio, and southeastern Florida—each restaurant identified by the distinctive “Pillars of Hercules” out front—could be said to have begun on the snowy February morning in 1956 when my father arrived at the Zebra Room to begin renovations.
Created on Wed Dec 03 13:26:47 EST 2014 (updated Wed Sep 05 14:37:53 EDT 2018)

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