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Information from the Finnish Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one. | |
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| Epigraph |
People would never fall in love if they hadn't heard love talked about.
~Francois de La Rochefoucauld  And you may ask yourself, Well,
how did I get here? ...
And you may ask yourself,
This is not my beautiful house.
And you may ask yourself,
This is not my beautiful wife.
~Talking Heads | |
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| Dedication |
For the roomies,
Stevie and Moo Moo | |
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To start with, look at all the books. | |
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Phyllida's hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face. Even now, at bed-and-breakfasts or seaside hotels, a shelf full of forlorn books always cried out to Madeline. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical - because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they'd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in. She used a line from Trollope's Barchester Towers as an epigraph: "There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel." Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read. The university's "British and American Literature Course Catalog" was, for Madeleine, what its Bergdorf equivalent was for her roommates. A course listing like "Engllish 274: Lyly's Euphues" excited Madeleine the way a pair of Fiorucci cowboy boots did Abby. "English 450A: Hawthorne and James" filled Madeleine with an expectation of sinful hours in bed not unlike what Olivia got from wearing a Lycra skirt and leather blazer to Danceteria. She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine's heart. Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking that Madeleine's natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan. His best dramatic moments came when the strain on his face from remembering his lines resembled the emotion he was trying to simulate. "You have to catch all the subtleties for me, don't you? You and your flair for catching subtleties. It must be nice to be rich and sit around all day catching subtleties." The magnolia trees hadn't read Roland Barthes. They didn't think love was a mental state; the magnolias insisted it was natural, perennial. As for Madeleine, she was either so used to male attention that she didn't notice it anymore or so guileless that she didn't suspect why three guys might perk themselves in her room like the suitors of Penelope. Billy took women's studies courses and referred to himself as a feminist. Presently, Billy had one hand sensitively in the back pocket of Madeleine's jeans. She had her hand in the back pocket of his jeans. They were moving along like that, each cupping a handful of the other. In Madeleine's face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable. "A Lover's Discourse" was the perfect cure for lovesickness. It was a repair manual for the heart, its one tool the brain. If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being "in love" was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny. Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken. The more girls Bankhead slept with, the more girls wanted to sleep with him. Which made Mitchell uncomfortably aware of how little he knew about girls in the first place. "People don't save other people. People save themselves." Old men were playing boules nearby, bending at the knee and releasing silver balls from their fingertips. The balls made pleasant when they struck one another. The sound of satisfactory, social democratic retirement. She was a large, disordered woman, like a child's drawing that didn't stay within the lines. Hearing a foreign language coming from people's mouths allowed Mitchell to imagine that everyone was having an intelligent conversation, even the balding woman who looked like Mussolini. He wanted women to love him, all women, beginning with his mother and going on from there. Therefore, whenever any woman got mad at him, he felt maternal disapproval crashing down upon his shoulders, as if he'd been a naughty boy. College feminists made fun of skyscrapers, saying they were phallic symbols. They said the same thing about space rockets, even though, if you stopped to think about it, rockets were shaped the way they were not because of phallocentrism but because of aerodynamics. Would a vagina-shaped Apollo 11 have made it to the moon? | |
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Information from the Finnish Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (1)
▾LibraryThing members' description
| Book description |
English major Madeleine Hanna must choose between two suitors while working on her senior thesis on the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. | |
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▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0374203059, Hardcover)
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—who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus—devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton—resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.
The triangle in this amazing and delicious novel about a generation beginning to grow up is age-old, and completely fresh and surprising. With devastating wit, irony, and an abiding understanding of and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides resuscitates the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
The author of two beloved novels, Middlesex (bestselling winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize, with more than 3 million copies sold) and the now classic The Virgin Suicides (made into a haunting film by Sofia Coppola), is back—with a brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking novel about the glories and vicissitudes of young love. (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Apr 2011 08:30:06 -0400) (see all 3 descriptions) ▾Library descriptions 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--who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience.… (more) » see all 7 descriptions |
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If this book is the only evidence, I would say the answer is: "Yes, they are dead. No it can't be done." Which is my way of saying that the book didn't live up to the blurb on the back cover . . . at least for me. I don't necessarily believe that great love stories are dead or that a new story can't be written . . . just that this book didn't do it.
Even the parts that attempt to be as witty as Jane Austen, read to me like the author was saying "look how witty I am," which I never feel when I read Austen.
I'm also not sure how most people can even understand most of what happens in the first third of the book. I actually graduated from college around the time setting of the book, and I read enough women's studies and literary theory to "get" the context. Still, I didn't find all the name/theory-dropping to be either necessary or interesting.
There were sections of the book that I enjoyed. I also thought it was an effective "treatment" of mental illness. But I really don't understand why setting the book 30 years ago was in any way a good choice . . . though I suspect there may be a bit of autobiography going on . . .
I read this book for a book group that meets soon to discuss it. I will be interested to hear what my book friends have to say about it. (