I was visiting Michael over at Bailey/Coy the other day, and he told me that HBO was adapting Jeffrey Eugenides's novel Middlesex into a miniseries. I've been thinking about this since then, and I'm still not sure how I feel about it.

Middlesex is, I think, one of the few novels I could recommend to virtually anyone (barring, of course, the excessively religious). It is a general-audience novel about a hermaphrodite that managed to both win the Pulitzer Prize and be chosen for Oprah's Book Club. It's deceptively easy to read, which pulls in a lot of people who would otherwise be turned off by a novel that doesn't feature guns and car chases, or smutty, tawdry sex. And the HBO series is sure to mean that more people will read it than ever before, which is a very good thing indeed. (If you haven't read it, you should. Most used bookstores have multiple copies; Oprah will do that to a book.)

And HBO has a pretty good track record with TV shows, but I remember their adaptation of Empire Falls from a few years ago:

(Empire Falls is another one of those Pulitzer-winning mass market books that is amazingly good, by the way. Not as good as Middlesex, but still charming and moving and funny). The miniseries made Empire Falls so pedestrian and bland. Even Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward couldn't save it from dullness. It didn't ruin the experience of the book for me, but it didn't help, either. Like the majority of the people who read it, I have a relationship with Middlesex. More important than that, a lot of transgendered people found the book to be pretty groundbreaking and validating, too. So my point is, HBO better not fuck this up. And then I saw that the whole thing is being produced by Rita Wilson (producer of My Big Fat Greek Wedding), and I'm starting to get nervous. The Millions thinks Wilson's involvement is a good sign, and who am I to argue with them? We're all just book bloggers who get nervous about adaptations.

But still: If you haven't read Middlesex, now is the time, before the miniseries comes along and becomes inextricably linked to the book forever.

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