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Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.
Here's the thing. I really wanted this book to be great. Sadly, I pretty much hate all the characters. I've read two-thirds of it and I just can't take it anymore. They are a miserable bunch, even though I love so many things about the book in general. I may go back to it, but for now I just want to smack them all (well, maybe not Mitchell as much as the others). How do you enjoy a book when you can't enjoy the characters? The angst is just too great for me at the moment. ( )
Without a really good grasp of Derrida, Barthes and deconstruction, much of the beginning of this book will feel more like a philosophy text than a novel, but it's worth it. What this novel really is is a deconstruction of the Victorian Marriage plot. It twists the ideas of that stilted and outdated formulaic plot and turns it on its head. The characters are reflections of people; they are not the real thing. Each of them is a deconstructed trope from the Marriage Plot. The 'bad choice' becomes the mentally ill man. The 'good choice', usually a strong, moral man, becomes a seeker (with a moral failing). The woman they both desire is a woman who studies the Marriage Plot, but fails to see it right in front of her face. All in all, it is an incredibly fun read. ( )
A love triangle consisting of three very quirky individuals made the Marriage Plot a truly interesting read but it was the originality of the ending that really impressed me. What an absolutely clever way to end a novel ! ( )
The novel isn’t really concerned with matrimony or the stories we tell about it, and the title, the opening glance at Madeleine’s library and the intermittent talk of books come across as attempts to impose an exogenous meaning. The novel isn’t really about love either, except secondarily. It’s about what Eugenides’s books are always about, no matter how they differ: the drama of coming of age.
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
Dedication
For the roomies, Stevie and Moo Moo
First words
To start with, look at all the books.
Quotations
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?
Last words
And Madeleine kept squinting, as though Mitchell was already far away, until finally, smiling gratefully, she answered, "Yes."
Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.
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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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