in the New York Observer called it "a hybrid form, epic crossed with history, romance, comedy, tragedy." Other reviews also categorized the book under various genres. Covering the lives of three generations of the Stephanides family, Middlesex is considered a family saga by novelist Geraldine Bedell. The book is more than a mere family saga, according to Samuel Cohen in his paper for Twentieth Century Literature; it depicts the Stephanides' trials and tribulations through historical events. Cohen is not convinced by Eugenides' declaration that Middlesex was not conceived as a historical novel; he said the novel satisfied much of the criterion for the genre. Cal, narrating his story in 2002, describes events from the early 1920s to the mid-1970s. According to Cohen, the difference in timeframes, at least 25 years apart, "establishes that the novel is set safely in the past". According to Stewart O'Nan of The Atlantic, Cal's narration evokes the style of the picaresque novel, retelling events that have already occurred and foreshadowing the future through "portentous glimpses". Francisco Collado-Rodríguez, a professor of American literature, classified the beginning of Middlesex as a historiographical and metafictional chronicle for its discussion of events such as the Greco-Turkish war and the Great Fire of Smyrna. He also considered the first section of the novel as a tragicomedy about the Stephanides' migration from Greece and assimilation into America. Soar posited Desdemona and Lefty's passage as a romantic comedy: the lovers, brother and sister, pretend to be strangers who meet for the first time, attempting "to unknow themselves, to remythologise themselves by developing a past they could live with, unfamiliar and therefore permissible". As the story progresses, Middlesex becomes a social novel about Detroit, discussing the seclusion of living in a 1970s suburb. At the end of the novel, the story adopts the tone of the detective genre. The novel is characterized as a "dramatic" Bildungsroman with a "big twist" because the coming-of-age story is revealed to be the incorrect one: after being nurtured as a woman, Cal must instead learn to become a man. The book has "two distinct and occasionally warring halves". Whereas the first part is about hermaphrodites, the second is about Greeks. The latter half, "full of incest, violence, and terrible family secrets", was considered by Daniel Mendelsohn, an author and critic, to be more effective because Middlesex is largely about how Callie inherited the momentous gene that "ends