HBO announced today plans to develop Jeffrey Eugenides' Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex, into an hour-long drama series. I don't know much about Donald Marguiles, the writer attached to the project, but I have serious doubts about whether this novel can be adapted serially. Middlesex is dense: a sweeping family history enmeshed with personal narrative,a novel that calls upon the arbiters of history to address the mysteries of the self. My concern is that a TV series will feel too reductive, given the scope of the novel. Wouldn't want Middlesex to be "a quirky, new drama series about a suburban Detroit hermaphrodite just trying to fit in..."
