Jeffrey Eugenides

It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and Geroge Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

The Marriage Plot

The story concerns three college friends from Brown University—Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell—beginning in their senior year, 1982, and follows them during their first year post-graduation

It was as if Leonard had brought his hot, stuffy little studio apartment with him, as though that was where he lived, emotionally, and anyone who wanted to be with him had to squeeze into that hot psychic space too. 

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.

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.

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. 

Arie P

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.

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

Unquestioning nihilism was no more intellectually sound than unquestioning faith…

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

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.

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.

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.'"

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.

This book profoundly impacted me, and I revisit it all the time. Jeffrey describes feelings and behaviours I have never been able to articulate 

Love stories can be tragic too… I wasn’t sure about the shifting narrative voice here, but the empathy and revelations here made the book.

Alex 

A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review • NPR • The New Republic • Salon • The Seattle Times • Houston Chronicle • The Miami Herald • Publisher's Weekly "Remind[s] us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love, and in love with books and ideas."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "A grand romance in the Austen tradition."—USA Today Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes---the charismatic and intense Leonard Bankhead, and her old friend the mystically inclined Mitchell Grammaticus. As all three of them face life in the real world they will have to reevaluate everything they have learned. Jeffrey Eugenides creates a new kind of contemporary love story in "his most powerful novel yet" (Newsweek).

A Novel

Patrick Book

Maybe it’s a case of dangerously high expectations, but I couldn’t enjoy this! I’ve actively put it off for a few years because ‘Middlesex’ was so mind-bendingly, precedent-setting good that I was worried he couldn’t follow it up. So it might be my fault, but this just didn’t seem to speak to me at all.

The characters were self-centered, the setting for the most part bland, their class looming over everything, and I enjoyed reading it! Eugenides did what he set out to do and found success in it, which I appreciate. Maybe I didn’t like Madeleine and Mitchell because I didn’t like Darcy or any of the other Austen folk. It was fun to reminisce about college and how fun it was. I  went through some heavy covid fomo but that’s to be expected. Leonard hit close to home, we went to the same high school (go warriors), we both get sad sometimes, we like to intellectualize things that would be better left alone. Interesting how we only got one chapter in his voice. I’m excited to read the rest of Jeff’s works, they might just be all-timers.

Eli Alvah Huckabee

What a delicious book this was to read until about 2/3 of the way through. Then it just kind of lulls suddenly into a deeply anticlimactic and depressing finish. But Id still recommend it to someone who has an appreciation for Eugenides. It is overall worth the read (this is hard to write cause Im still not sure I believe it).

kaitlan

wow I am a little broken after that last page lol

First, let me get my complaints out of the way. The main character Madeleine is an English major who just graduated from Brown, and as a recent English major who just graduated from Brown myself, I was excited for this happy coincidence. But I found the way that the book talks about academia and literature to be stuffy and erudite and also very (whitely) canonical. I mean, I understand Shakespeare is great, and also that this novel is set in 1982, but can we not. It makes fun of people like Thurston Meems (that one kid in class that sounds smart and is probably smart but can't keep it to himself and uses big words too much and name drops Derrida and Freud for clout) but kind of ends up sounding like him a little, sometimes. There's a line that reads, "Rereading Hemingway's sentences, Mitchell recognized that they were, indeed, implicitly addressed to the male reader" (141). So that's a great note. But I feel like Marriage Plot is, indeed, implicitly addressed to the well-educated, white reader. While the book has refreshingly feminist bits, Madeleine (and everyone around her) seems so... white. Basically everyone in this book is white, which is fine, I guess, but obviously limiting, especially if Jeffrey is trying to write a book that claims to tackle the modern marriage plot. I mean, he limits it to an entirely white cast (the members of whom are intellectually and emotionally inspired by a mostly white canon of literature), the only non-white cast featuring Calcutta locals who convert him to an anti-deodorant lifestyle. And Mother Teresa. Well, maybe the entire literary trope of the marriage plot was white to begin with, so maybe this is an unfair critique. But still. This was written in 2011, you know? I guess my problem is that this book masquerades as a universal analysis of the "modern marriage plot" but is so particularly entrenched in privileged whiteness, with characters (and perhaps a plot) that doesn't recognize that privilege at all.

Those critiques aside, I'm rating this book 5 stars because I feel like it really does warrant a reread, and/or discussion, and/or a recommendation. Those critiques aside, it's quite wonderful. The central question of the book is delivered by a side character we never see again: "People don't save other people. People save themselves" (124). Is this true? It can't be. Right? Love must be greater than that, right? These are the questions the book engages with. 

At the introduction of her famous Conversations on Love, Natasha Lunn quotes Hilary Mantel: "Love is stronger, more lasting than fear." Natasha continues: "And when I interviewed Hilary she told me that 'one reason to write is to try to find out if that is so.'" Natasha compiled Conversations on Love to confront that question. Jeffrey Eugenides wrote The Marriage Plot to do the same. 

Natasha Lunn asks, "Is love stronger than the fear of uncertainty? Than the fear of change? Than the fear of death?" I think we all know the right answer to those questions. Yes. Yes. Yes. Of course. But what Marriage Plot does is stretch the question. Of course love is stronger than the fear of uncertainty. We will act that way because that is the way we want to believe in (so we confess, we kiss, we just shoot whatever shot we got). Maybe we can't survive if we believe in the opposite. But love is not stronger than uncertainty itself, nor change, nor death. Sometimes - more times than we can bear, maybe all the time - love is built on uncertainty, or fear, even death. That is, love is the thing that necessarily emerges from the scary sidewalk cracks because we need it to. 

Most of the time, we get it wrong. But maybe, even if we get it wrong, "to feel so much was its own justification" (126). So we try. We try to save ourselves. And we do try saving others too. And they try saving us. The saving is always a bit imbalanced, but this is the thing: We save each other, over and over again, without any of us knowing just how much love has leaked in and out of our lives. (This is, at least, what I'd like to take from this book, even if at a literary level, The Marriage Plot is about the marriage plot: how marriage and love bonds show us the limits of societal freedom, gender ties, legal systems, women's rights (or lack thereof), etc.)

Also, I think Jeffrey Eugenides has his own clear answer on the two questions: (1) Do soulmates exist? and (2) Does right person wrong time exist? 

And then, as he ends the book, Jeffrey just laughs, haha, in a writerly kind of way. Haha, this is literature and of course I'm going to make you think about it yourself. 

The ending is my favorite part, by the way. The ending is what made this 5 stars.

Irene Alegre

I didn't feel like this novel was pretentious, as many reviewers say. It's tough, and a somewhat hard read, but to be honest I'd still take it to the beach. It's not so hard to follow that it becomes boring. And yes, it's a book about many things that revolves around topics of high importance. It's not your novel if you are looking for a light read, or if you expect a Middlesex II. This is not Middlesex, this is not The Virgin Suicides. This is The Marriage Plot. I appreaciate an author's evolution and progress as something good. You might not enjoy what he's evolved into, but that's a totally different story.

Amy Vicknair

Meh, kinda pretentious. It made me curious to read some of the other books mentioned by the main characters but the story itself was like plowing though weeds. Some passages were almost lyrical but I wouldn't say run out and get this now

Finn Salter

I’m tired of reading books where the male characters are just constantly objectifying women. Ugh.

Cindy Lieberman

3.5. Interesting topics but largely unlikeable characters.

Jess Madson

I always feel strange critiquing books because I don't even write at all, much less write Pulitzer 
 Prize-winning literature. That disclaimer aside, I just couldn't get into this one and it took me a while to read it...I'm not sure why. I think it just kind of bummed me out overall and I didn't feel like the story had any kind of meaning or message - I finished it and thought, so what? Maybe I'm not smart enough for Eugenides.... I did think the characterization was well done (especially Phyllida) and I enjoyed the references to being an English major :)

Melody Izard

You might think that the way I will start this review implies that maybe I didn't like this book. But you will be wrong. It was most notable.

The carefree way these college graduates flitted about Europe and India and rented Apartments in New York and didn't worry about getting a job and applied to expensive graduate schools to pursue purely academic pursuits kept my stomach a bit rumbly since I have a daughter about to graduate and the thought of bankrolling these types of endeavors makes my financial worry wrinkle get ever so much deeper. But other than that .....

Not only do you get to look at mental illness with a high powered microscope you explore religions and work with Mother Theresa and dapple about in Victorian marriage plot literature. And then you get that lovely ending. The pampered youth (who didn't seem to realize they were pampered) kept the extra rating star away though I must confess.

Tracey O’Rourke

I was disappointed. I kept having to make myself read more. I never really connected with any of the characters.

Summer Stanley

Started so engaging with what seemed like dynamic and interesting characters. The final fourth of the book however spiraled into predictability and most of the characters lost their intrigue or became down right awful. Disappointing.

Abby Hoggatt

I really wanted to love this book, and for a short while I couldn't put it down. I feel like there were just so many parts of it that left me unsatisfied. Too much buildup with no resolution. Maybe that's the point of the book, but it just didn't do it for me!

Allyson Marrs

There are things to admire here, but overall, I found the book pretentious, preachy, and overflowing with unnecessarily descriptive prose. I wouldn't read it again. I just think it was too much, overall. Adverbs, philosophy and boring "in-head" writing. Not for me.

Catarina

Uns dias penso "3 estrelas", outros "ok, 4 estrelas". Talvez 3,5 estrelas? Não sei. Vou ser simpática e deixar 4, a pender revisão. Parecendo que não, isto é uma boa representação da minha opinião sobre este livro.

Anna Pinto

A lot more "normal" than The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. The absence of strangeness and epicness made this book the least enjoyable for me.

The Marriage Plot

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