Jeffrey Eugenides

Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn't get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot: purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more Bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn't lived up to expectations. But now, in the spring of her senior year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course "to see what all the fuss is about," and, for reasons that have nothing to do with school, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morton - charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Oregon boy resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

The Marriage Plot

Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers.

Sophomore year, she'd bought an electric-blue satin bowling shirt with the name "Mel" stitched on the pocket and began wearing it when she went to parties at Mitchell's apartment. But she must have worn it once too often, because one night he made a face and said, "What? Is that your arty shirt?" 

"You wear that bowling shirt whenever you hang out with me and my friends." 

"Larry has one just like it," Madeleine defended herself. 

"Yeah, but his is all pitted out. Yours is in perfect condition. It's like Louis the Fourteenth's bowling shirt. It shouldn't say 'Mel' on the pocket. It should say 'The Sun King.'"

And still this wasn’t the Disease. Being depressed about the state of the world—air pollution, mass starvation, the invasion of East Timor—wasn’t the Disease. Going into the bathroom and staring at his face, noticing the ghoulish veins beneath his skin, checking out his nose pores until he was convinced that he was a hideous creature whom no girl could ever love—even this wasn’t the Disease. This was a characterological prelude, but it wasn’t chemical or somatic. It was the anatomy of melancholy, not the anatomy of his brain.

Leonard could feel the huge tide of sadness waiting to rush over him. But there was an invisible barrier keeping the full reality of it from touching him. It was like squeezing a baggie full of water and feeling all the properties of the liquid without getting wet. So there was at least that to be grateful for. The life that was ruined wasn’t entirely his.

Arie P

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

So here, intellectualism = questions. Does faith leave space for questions? Should it?

Unquestioning nihilism was no more intellectually sound than unquestioning faith…

Each neighbor was doing his or her own to keep up standards, which was difficult because the French ideal wasn't clearly delineated like the neatness and greenness of American lawns, but more of a picturesque disrepair. It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully.

That was the odd thing about Leonard’s disease, the almost pleasurable way it began. At first his dark moods were closer to melancholy than to despair. There was something enjoyable about wandering around the city alone, feeling forlorn. There was even a sense of superiority, of being right, in not liking the things other kids liked: football, cheerleaders, James Taylor, red meat. 

He felt as if he were being violently emptied out, as if a big magnet were pulling his blood and fluids down into the earth. He was weeping again, unstoppably, his head like the chandelier in his grandparents’ house in Buffalo, the one that was too high for them to reach and that every time he visited had one fewer bulb alight. His head was an old chandelier, going dark.

A sense of impending doom, of universal malevolence, pursued him the entire way. Tree limbs gesticulated menacingly in his peripheral vision. Telephone lines sagged like pythons between the poles.

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