The marriage plot (original 2011; edition 2011)

The blurb on the back says: "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?"

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. ( )

Great fun, well written. Also the best depiction of mental illness/bipolar disorder that I've ever read (much better than some non-fictional accounts; just goes to show that art sometimes illuminates and explains better than journalism or "reality") ( )

While I liked Middlesex quite a bit, I'm more mixed on The Marriage Plot. This book is peppered with references to literature, literary theory, and academia. I can see how that would be a turnoff for some readers, but I found it pretty well done and consistent with the Ivy League intellectualism of the main characters. What was a bit of a turnoff for me was the narcissism, elitism, and general unlikability of all three of our heroes. They are all, of course, meticulously developed, well-written, and sympathetic, but spending an entire book with them takes a lot of energy.

[full review here: http://spacebeer.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-marriage-plot-by-jeffrey-eugenides.htm... ] ( )

I'm 4 CDs in on the audiobook and I'm finally giving up. I feel like I'm in a room full of elitist snobs, unable to keep up my end of the conversation. Maybe if I had a Master's degree in Philosophy or English lit, the characters and story would be more relatable. Not at all what I was expecting. Meh.

And I'm not sure what shelf to put this on. It's not really "to read" but I didn't finish it, so it shouldn't be on the "read" shelf either. I think Goodreads needs a fourth option "Unfinished" just for books like this one. ( )

A good yarn, but a tiny detail threw me: at one point a character lists a bunch of 80s metal bands, and ends with "Motordeath". Who? Did he mean Motörhead?

...MAYBE 2.5. There is some good writing in there, but it wasn't enough to save this book for me. I thought the plot concept was too weak to carry this much wordage, all tangents & book-name dropping. I found the characters one-dimensional and immature, and many of the relationships between characters unrealistic. not impressed. ( )

Oh, Mr. Eugenides, you are good. Just as I did his other two novels, I LOVED this book. It's not perfect, but it is such a pleasure to read. Very entertaining and involved. Just the right amount of literary snark and intellectualism. He's excellent. I can't wait for his next book. ( )

Jeffrey Eugenides will always be one of those authors whose books I will buy immediately upon release. The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex were, to my mind, masterful pieces of literature. So once his typical decade-long silence was completed and The Marriage Plot was unleashed, I couldn't wait to devour it. But by the time it was over, I found myself in a position I'm rarely in after reading Eugenides: disappointed.

The novel itself is, as its title suggests, disarmingly simple in its presentation. Madeleine, the young, idealistic, upper-middle class white girl at the center of everything, is on the verge of graduating from Brown University, and is torn by her love for the erudite but esoteric Leonard and her (let's just call it interesting) friendship with Mitchell, who naturally wants their relationship to be something more. The novel's blurb pretends that the novel will be filled with intrigue over who Madeleine chooses, but the truth is that it becomes fairly obvious that Eugenides is more interested by the relationship between Leonard and Madeleine (and how it fits into the old "marriage plot" paradigm), with Mitchell on the outskirts trying to edge his way in.

As is typical with all of Eugenides' works, the characters drive the story, and even though by the end most readers will conclude that most of them have been pretty simplistically drawn and realized (particularly Leonard, who gets an almost insulting resolution to his character arc), they are realistic enough and enthralling enough that we care deeply about the three main cogs in this machine. Couple that with Eugenides' enviable style--consistently thoughtful yet compulsively readable and relatable--and you find a novel that's very hard to put down, and that's not a bad thing.

The problem is that it all comes crashing down at the end. I'm not exaggerating when I say that, as I neared the novel's conclusion, I kept getting drawn out of the story by my awareness of how close I was to the end, and how alarmed I was that there appeared to be threads that remained unresolved. The last four pages of the book, specifically, were exceptionally maddening because the 400+ pages that came before seemed so patient and so thoughtfully constructed, and I couldn't fathom how or why he decided to rush the ending. Did he not know where he wanted things to go? I can't believe that, because the last page ties things up in the most obvious bow possible. (Many have praised this final page as a stroke of genius--to me, it was hackneyed and rather cheap.) I left the novel wishing for more, but not in a good way. Perhaps if The Marriage Plot was 450 pages, it would have been something close to a masterpiece. At its current length, however, it feels lacking and more than a bit disappointing. I look forward in 2023 to stronger work from a writer I strongly respect.

First off, I really hated MIDDLESEX (horrifyingly binary ideas about gender, location of intersex bodies' origin in incest, etc), so I was predisposed to dislike THE MARRIAGE PLOT.

I read it anyway because I love Barthes' A LOVER'S DISCOURSE and because the novel sounded like it might be critical in an interesting way of the elite liberal arts college industrial complex, or at least a fun romp through a cultural moment. But no.

Again I found Eugenides basic worldview repellant, uninteresting, and badly observed. I don't trust his depiction of straight women and am bored by his depiction of straight men. The story is about a heterosexual love triangle and the woman operates pretty exclusively as an object to bring the men together (I'm thinking of Sedgwick's BETWEEN MEN here). On a very basic level, this novel doesn't pass the Bechdel test. And there's weird class stuff, all this unexamined privilege. I just really dislike and distrust Eugenides's authorial worldview and I also didn't think it was particularly well-written or plotted. I mean, the writing was *fine* but really not special to me. ( )

Smashing characters. Developed beautifully within the story. Created a believable and highly desired ending! ( )

Read from August 04 to 19, 2011

There are some authors everyone expects amaze-balls from. Eugenides is one of those. And of course, there are overrated writers that people praise because they think it's cool..Eugenides is not one of those (but Franzen is.) While I don't think this is anything like Middlesex, it's definitely worth reading.

I didn't LOVE this one, but I liked it. I never wanted to stop reading it, I just didn't read it as quickly as a book that I'm LOVING, you know? Each character is completely developed and I loved Leonard, Mitchell, and Madeline.... They're all flawed, but like real people, they've got good qualities, too. ( )

I can't say I loved this one. The beginning was dull for me, but I slugged through and it did get better. Mitchell's plotline probably saved the book for me. No complaints about the writing: that was solid. But I don't think I liked Madeline much; she's a bit flaky at times. I thought Leonard was a geek when I first met him, then Mitchell's perspective showed me that he was actually a popular guy on campus. Strange that I missed that component on my own. The literary, philosophical, and theological discussions in the book really interested me and possibly redeemed some of the book for me. I think this is one of those books that would probably come through stronger after a book club discussion than just reading alone. I kind of needed more discussion about the idea of the marriage plot, more references throughout the novel, to really understand how it was foundational to the book (the interview with the author at the end helped fill in some gaps for me). I liked [b:Middlesex|2187|Middlesex|Jeffrey Eugenides|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316727862s/2187.jpg|1352495] a whole lot more. ( )

In the Regency and Victorian periods, English novels usually had a "marriage plot", in which the heroine dealt with choosing between marrying one of two men, each having different personality characteristics. This book is an update and a deconstruction that type of plot.

There's a love triangle, in which Madeleine, a lit major, chooses between Mitchell, a soul-searching religious studies major, and Leonard, a troubled biology major. The action takes place in the early eighties (why Eugenides chose to set it then I haven't figured out yet, but I was pleased, because that made the characters my contemporaries).

All of the characters are well-read and intelligent. Plenty of books are discussed and name-dropped. Whenever I expected someone to be a cliche, or a "type", I was put in my place by Eugenides' insight and mastery of characterization. I would recommend this book to any bibliophile who enjoys a good exploration of the human heart (a love story, in other words). But don't read it if you're one of those romance buffs who expects a happily-ever-after ending. This book is much more nuanced than that, and takes into consideration that just because people love one another, it doesn't necessarily mean they should spend their lives together.

This book, for the most part, tells a smaller-scale story than "Middlesex", except for a section where Mitchell, in his trip to India, contemplates some larger questions and comes to know himself better. I found Mitchell Grammaticus to be one of the most engaging characters I've read about this year.

This is a book that I may come back to one day, and I don't say that lightly. ( )

I was thoroughly enjoying the story until Eugenides incorrectly uses the title "Seeds of Temptation" for a Thomas Merton book that Mitchel brings along only to discover that there is also a factual error of the same sort in the printed version of the book. Such a mistake seems unprofessional on the part of both the publisher and the writer.

That being said, it's been something like 7 years since Middlesex was in paperback and since I read it so I don't exactly remember what I loved so much about it. This was an enjoyable and easy book and of course saddens me so much being a happily married woman (a Stage 2?). I found myself remembering my own days of Undergrad and what it was like to be newly in love with my now husband.

A good read especially if you were an English Major in College. ( )

Okay this was a serious, straight up adult literary book and I didn't hate it! The writing is of course superb although at times gets weighted down with a few too many intellectual fancy-pants references. The story, what there was, was compacted, complex and oddly satisfying. The characters too were complex and messed up and crazy and absurd and quite honestly lovely. The time period, early 80's was always well done. Good narrator too. I enjoyed it for sure. ( )

Wow...This book took longer to read than most I've read lately. Not sure why. I enjoyed The Marriage Plot for a variety of reasons. At first, I enjoyed reading about the city in which I was born and grew up (Providence) and tried to imagine the confusing East Side streets (my childhood church is on Congdon St). After awhile, I really started to care about Madeline, Leonard, and Mitchell even though in real life I'd probably not like them very much.

The Marriage Plot is the story of these 3 people at the end of their college careers at Brown University. What will they do when they grow up? Who will they be? In relationships, is love enough or is more needed? I don't think any of these questions were answered and that's ok. It was enjoyable to go along on their journeys. ( )

This is one of those books that I had fairly high expectations of because reviewers raved about it. It started off okay but then our three main protagonists became insufferable. Mitchell less so than the other two but still. Madeleine turned from a strong female character to a whining complainer. If this is a well-written woman then I would hate to see a poorly written one. Nothing she seemed to do mattered. It was all about how the men reacted to her. She wasn't much of a character in her own right. But then again I guess turning women into objects is something that Eugenides did in "The Virgin Suicides" so I shouldn't be surprised. ( )

Read ~ 100 pages. I'm done reading it, although technically I'm not going to finish reading it. My time is too valuable to spend reading a book that doesn't "grab" me. ( )

Although I enjoyed The Marriage Plot overall, ultimately it fell short of realizing its potential. Eugenides is no doubt a talented author, and clearly does not rush anything to publication, having only published 3 novels in almost 20 years, but this could possibly have done with a little extra tweaking.

This book has been out for a few months, so I'll try to keep the synopsis short. The love triangle plot revolves around three Brown graduates, focusing on the year or so following their graduation in June, 1982. Mitchell, the author in thinly veiled fictional form, is an awkward Greek boy from Detroit, obsessed with religion and with a girl named Madeleine. Madeleine is a bibliophilist English major, struggling with the semiotic interpretation of literature, particularly with the plot type centering on the marriage of its main characters, most popular in 18th & early 19th century lit. She's of Greek heritage and a privileged background, and is obsessed with Leonard. Leonard is supposed to be of more modest roots, from Portland, OR, and is wicked smart and bi-polar. Leonard is not obsessed with Mitchell and kind of likes Madeleine.

I'll start with the virtues. Eugenides deftly captures all the emotional turmoil of transitioning from teenager child to young adult sent out into the "real" world. Everyone feels everything with vivid acuteness. Break-ups are earth-shattering, even if the relationship was a mere three months long. Everyone is afraid of rejection, though they all face a fair amount of it. The reader keenly feels every self-conscious apprehension. At one point, Madeleine becomes suddenly self-conscious when having a conversation with Leonard that isn't going so well:
The conversation lapsed. And suddenly, to her surprise, Madeleine was flooded with panic. She felt the silence like a judgment against her. At the same time, her anxiety about the silence made it harder to speak. (This is a scenario to which I can definitely relate - my now spouse can attest to that.) Their joys are also intensely felt, and I enjoyed the poser-ish ways of college students brought to light, the unfounded self-assuredness flaunted to mask secret insecurities, the bookshelves lined with appropriately intellectual books, the patronizing combativeness that passes as flirting, etc. And the state of things at the end of the book was ultimately satisfying.

Now, the vices. Madeleine is supposed to be a liberal, feminist character, but she spends most of the novel in reactive instead of active mode (even in the end, which took away from the otherwise satisfying ending). Her thesis is in part titled Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot, but we never find out what those thoughts actually are. She is a grown woman who calls her father "Daddy." Is it just me that finds that weird and creepy? Mitchell, for most of the novel, is suffering his unrequited love for Madeleine, and is on a spiritual journey or mission of sorts. But his journey seems to be dismissed in the end. Leonard is mostly trying to deal with his bi-polar-ness, and we only get a glimpse into his story for one section, past the middle of the novel.

The story is ultimately about finding oneself, or coming to some hard-earned conclusions about one's place in the world, and in that it succeeds, at least in part. The characters were interesting and relatable, and mostly likeable. It was a worthwhile read overall, as long as you can accept some of the elements that don't quite work. ( )

3.5/5 ( )

Eugenides writes characters wonderfully, and he seems to be saying something about the shift in narrative away from the marriage plot running alongside the growing impermanence of marriage itself. An erudite, enjoyable read that likely won't have the more universal appeal of his other work. ( )

Not having read Middlesex (yet), I had nothing no reference points for The Marriage Plot. Luckily, the author has woven hundreds of profound, provocative, and downright hilarious references through the text himself.

I can't think of any other 'campus novel' where I've had the feeling of being in the company of characters who seemed not just believable, but believably clever. Eugenides manages to capture that intoxicating sense of being in one's intellectual prime without once patronising the reader. If you like jokes about semiotics and theology, then this one is for you. If you know nothing about semiotics and/or theology but are interested in being delighted by the ironies of both, this is still the one for you, as you will find everything you need effortlessly slipped into place for you.

But the real strength of the novel, to my mind, is the unflinching emotional core. Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard never let the fact that they are clever get in the way of making mistakes, which makes them so endearing to be around. I finished the book a few days ago and am still waking up missing these characters in the morning.

Thoroughly recommended. ( )

Deserves at least 4 stars, maybe 4.5.

I think the relationship between Madeleine and Leonard wasn't as romantic as I would have liked and it was hard for me to sense the physical beauty of Madeleine's despite many people's protestations, but overall I think the feelings of desperation and longing were strong between the characters.

I had read about physical and even psychological similarities between people Eugenides knew and the characters in the book, and if I hadn't read about it I don't know if I would have made that connection (without some modicum of random thought), and overall I think that realization detracted from the experience. I found myself taken away from the characters as people in it of themselves, and comparing the authenticity of the "portrayal."

Overall Eugenides has done it again and he writes about contemporary American life as deftly as anybody. ( )

Oh dear. I had a hard time rating this one. One the one hand, it hits me right in the demographic, with its story about a a Brown college English major in the early 1980s. (I was at a different liberal arts small college, Occidental, but the details are very true to my own experience, right down to the syllabus of the Lit Crit course.) So, I was prepped to love this, and indeed, I did love the trip down memory lane. I also, surprisingly, loved the last two pages with their perfect ending. Sadly, the rest of the book never quite gelled for me. I just did not feel that the characters ever truly breathed and I found myself annoyed a number of times when things happened or people said things that just did not in any way ring true for me. So, despite the fact that I am doing just what Eugenides warns against "I loved the book because...", "It spoke to me because...", I never fully committed to this book and found it ultimately disappointing. ( )

B*tches in Bookstores inspired me to finally pick this up. Thanks Jill and Kelly!

I think that Eugenides has trouble with satisfying endings. I felt the same way with Middlesex as I did with The Marriage Plot.

I liked this book, I like the way it was told through the 3 different characters, but at the same time, I felt like the method of storytelling didn't lend itself well to building depth in these characters. Yes, we got to know about them, but I never truly felt like I understood what each of them was doing or their true rationale behind their actions. Believe it or not, I didn't feel like the book was long enough; maybe he could have used his language more efficiently but I don't know.

Don't get me wrong, I really liked this book. It's just no Middlesex or The Virgin Suicides. ( )