The Marriage Plot

The characterization in this book is amazing. These people are as fully developed as any I've ever read, all flawed and all sympathetic. Even the secondary characters are better drawn than the main characters of many mediocre books I've read. The author's skewering of college literary discussion or American spiritual seekers in India or young wanderers in their hostels is brilliant. In a book that is heavy and rarely happy, I found myself reading parts aloud to my husband because the satire was too perfect to keep to myself. His description of bipolar disorder, from the perspective of the patient and his family, is amazing. It is possibly the best description of mental illness I've read. His description of family dynamics, both healthy show more and not, is also remarkable. I got bogged down occasionally in the anxious headspace of the characters, Mitchell in particular whom I liked less than the other two, and the ending was appropriate and realistic but not satisfying. I would have preferred a more hopeful ending than the not-completely-devoid-of-hope ending that we got, though a better ending would have been unconvincing without either changing almost the entire second half of the book or adding another hundred pages. I would have read those hundred pages to leave these characters in a better place. As it is, while I marvel at this author's skill of observation and description, I don't think I have the heart to read more of his writing. show less

Smart people reading books, finding themselves, and falling in love in the Ivy League of the early '80s. This is a premise that could horribly flat if not for the deftness of Eugenides' plot and his meticulously constructed love triangle. You can enjoy this as a page-turning postmodern take on Austen and Eliot, or you can try to construct some kind of deeper archetypal interpretation: is the rivalry between Mitchell and Leonard a metaphor for the competing interests of science and religion? Is the bandanna-wearing Leonard a stand-in for the late, great David Foster Wallace (although Eugenides makes sure to point out that Leonard hates tennis)? Eugenides adds enough fly-on-the wall detail to make The Marriage Plot believable, even with show more its fantastic sheen and exotic locales (Calcutta, Monte Carlo). Highly recommended. show less

I really would give this four and a half stars -- it's very close to five. The only thing that keeps me from giving this five stars is that Madeleine's thesis, which I thought would be a fairly continuous thread in the novel (given that it gave rise to the title), dropped out of sight completely for much of the book, such that its mention at the very end struck me as slightly jarring.

The Marriage Plot did an extraordinary job of taking me back to my college days, in the intellectual sense. College is a time when students encounter challenges to accepted modes of thought and discover new perspectives from which to approach age-old questions. This can be experienced both as intellectual excitement (so much to discover! so much is new!) show more and as intellectual vertigo (nothing is stable! we have to question everything?). I thought Eugenides captured that period perfectly; his characters see so much possibility in the world, but also wrestle with being overwhelmed by it.

One of my favorite things about the book was how seamlessly the perspectives of different characters were integrated. I almost didn't notice the first time the book stopped following Madeleine's story and picked up the path of another character, because the narrator's voice was so consistent. Even though you were seeing inside a different character's head, a character with completely different thoughts and emotions and motivations, it was so clearly part of the same story that I could just relax into the current of the story without worrying about changes of direction.

I mention this because it strikes me as very different from [b:The Dovekeepers|10950924|The Dovekeepers|Alice Hoffman|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1306253903s/10950924.jpg|15868401], which I also read recently. Though I loved that book too, the changes from one character's story to another were quite jarring, and each time I worried that I wouldn't like the new narrator or wouldn't identify with her character as strongly as I had the next. I always did, in the end, but it also always took me several pages before I was comfortable with the new voice.

For those of you planning to pick this up, I'll be honest and tell you that the first couple of chapters made me feel a little dumb, as I am definitely not well-versed in the field of semiotics and several of the names dropped were unfamiliar to me. But don't worry, that feeling of being a bit out of your depth doesn't last, and in some ways I thought it was a bit of a brilliant way of reminding the reader how it feels to be treading water in a subject that at the moment is beyond your ken. show less

The Bachelor/ette-ization of America

As a seemingly perpetual joke, The Bachelor/ette television series illustrates the perils of modern “love”. Each season, a group of mildly-intriguing-but-mostly-insane contestants compete for the affection of a suitor as if the final prize is a life lived happily ever after.

Yet outside a few positive examples, these contestants never walk down the aisle. Although we know the show ends poorly, the ratings remind us that, as a society, we knowingly erase the last failure and hope once more that some striking strangers will find true love.

Life is never happily ever after. With The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides explores the notion of romantic relationships and the modern shift toward a culture that show more chooses to destroy that very same relationship.

In a quotation that summarizes the main idea of the novel, Eugenides writes, regarding a university course taken by the protagonist, Madeleine,

“In [the professor’s] opinion, the novel [in the abstract, not referencing a specific work] had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely” (22).

Set in the 1980s at the end of a successful stint at Brown University and the immediate years afterward, The Marriage Plot explores the lives and relationships between three main characters.

The Girl: Madeleine

Madeleine grew up in an upper-middle-class home. The daughter of a college president, Madeleine values education but also desires to escape the rigid structure of her family. Bright, but not brilliant in any specific field, Madeleine majors in English. Her love of academic work compels her to continue her education, but she finds study rather difficult:

“She studied for the GRE using a sample booklet. The verbal section was easy. The math required brushing up on her high school algebra. The logic problems, however, were a defeat to the spirit. ‘At the annual dancers’ ball a number of dancers performed their favorite dance with their favorite partners. Alan danced the tango, while Beck watched the waltz. James and Charlotte were fantastic together. Keith was magnificent during his foxtrot and Simon excelled at rumba. Jessica danced with Alan. But Laura did not dance with Simon. Can you determine who danced with whom and which dance they each enjoyed?’ Logic wasn’t something Madeleine had been expressly taught. It seemed unfair to be asked about it. She did as the book suggested, diagramming the problems, placing Alan, Becky, James, Charlotte, Keith, Simon, Jessica, and Laura on the dance floor of her scrap paper, and pairing them according to the instructions. But their complicated transit wasn’t a subject Madeleine’s mind naturally followed. She wanted to know why James and Charlotte were fantastic together, and if Jessica and Alan were going out, and why Laura wouldn’t dance with Simon, and if Becky was upset, watching” (39).

The end of this long quotation signifies the core reason behind Madeleine’s struggles. Despite her love for study, she can’t help but focus on the relationships in life. College for Madeleine, is more about the people she meets than the topics she studies.

Boy One: Mitchell

Mitchell grew up in Detroit. Having met Madeleine at a party during their freshman year, Mitchell falls in love and forges a tight friendship with her. Unable to conjure the courage to shift the relationship from the “friend zone” to one of a more romantic nature, Mitchell and Madeleine eventually drift apart. Seeking to find meaning at the deeper levels of life, Mitchell transfers his energy from pursuing Madeleine to religious studies.

“There was no evident proselytizing motive. But the effect, for Mitchell, was to make him aware of the centrality of religion in human history, and more important, of the fact that religious feeling didn’t arise from going to church or reading the Bible but from the most private interior experiences, either of great joy or of staggering pain” (93).

With no job prospects on the horizon and a slight desire to attend a school of divinity, Mitchell and a friend travel the world after graduation. From Europe to India, Mitchell’s pilgrimage strengthens his convictions both about Madeleine and about spirituality.

Boy Two: Leonard

Leonard was raised in Portland, Oregon. Diagnosed with manic depression, Leonard succeeds in the Brown University classrooms but struggles with maintaining barriers in friendships. Sometimes delightful and compelling, while at other times overbearing and awkward, Leonard thrills and kills many friendships. Meeting Madeleine during a course on semiotics, the two immediately magnetize, spending every waking second with the other.

Majoring in biology and set to study at a prestigious fellowship, Leonard’s manic depression threatens to combust both his relationship and his career. Hoping to find a middle ground, he takes massive doses of lithium. Eugenides writes,

“Ten yards away, a statue of a Minuteman, spray-painted with graffiti, rose from the weedy grass. With their flintlock rifles, the Minutemen had fought for liberty and won. If they’d been on lithium, though, they wouldn’t have been Minutemen. They would have been Fifteen-minutemen, or Half-hour-men” (275).

Yet the medication kills the manic function that allowed Leonard to succeed with Madeleine and in the lab.

The Importance of Relationships

As the plot unfolds, these three characters interact on conflicting planes. With brilliant prose and in-depth introspection, Eugenides portrays compelling characters. Light on plot but nonetheless a captivating read, The Marriage Plot explores the meaning of relationships in the unfamiliar and frightening post-collegiate world. As the characters work toward finding identity, their interactions hurt.

We all know that the boy rarely ever finds the girl without leaving some sort of pain for the hopes of a third party. The Bachelor/ette, in fact, distills this idea into an 8 episode season. The happily-ever-after mentality does not exist, but that fact doesn’t require that we forget the importance of relationships. Even though some of Eugenides references might get lost on people unfamiliar with collegiate courses on English and religious studies, the whole package of The Marriage Plot offers a must read.

Originally published at http://wherepenmeetspaper.blogspot.com show less

This is one of those books I’ve been meaning to read for years and just never got around to it. I liked The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex a lot, so I figured I would probably like this book as well. I figured wrong. The plot centers around three main characters who attended Brown University in 1982. The events span a few months before graduation and about a year beyond.
The first main character is Madeline. A blond, upper middle class WASP from New Jersey who is somewhat selfish, overly read and frankly, not that interesting. Mitchell Grammatics (really stupid name) is in love with Madeline...for some reason. She doesn’t love him, but also doesn’t seem to mind slightly leading him on over the course of their college years. After show more graduation Mitchell goes to Europe and India to get over this inexplicable four year crush. Unfortunately for readers he is unsuccessful at this. And then there is Leonard Bankhead. Madeline does love Leonard, a bi-polar slob of a science intern. But Madeline begins to waver in her love for Leonard because bi-polar = hard. And she isn’t someone who does hard.

The Marriage Plot reminds me of everything I didn’t like about Curtis Sittenfields novel Prep. I simply have zero interest in the manufactured problems of upper middle class Ivy Leaguers who have coasted through life and are so bored that they have to create obstacles for themselves. And the obstacles created are fairly existential and lame.
It might had been a more interesting novel had the focus been on Leaonard's struggle with mental illness and the effect this had on his work and relationships. Instead, the author split the narrative into three alternating voices. The result of which is that all of the characters never moved beyond the superficial. And that's The Marriage Plot. A dull read about three dull people. show less

I LOVED, LOVED, LOVED this book. It was like a big hot fudge sundae for anyone who has ever been a lovesick, confused English (or Religious Studies) major. My only quibble is that Eugenides throws in a bunch of great period details, but considering the chronology of the characters' undergraduate years and the year or so following graduation, I think some of them may be in the wrong place and slightly anachronistic. I'd love for another reader to prove me wrong, though, so I can upgrade this review to five stars.

This should be titled, "The Pretentious Plot." I disliked every single character from the main three to the parents to the random friends who make seldom appearances. Literally, the only character I found somewhat amusing was the semiotics professor who didn't speak. Every person in this book was shallow, unrealistic, selfish, and not all that intelligent as they claimed to be. This novel felt very forced and convenient; I could smell the plot twists miles away. Nothing about it surprised me, other than the fact that Leonard didn't commit suicide, which was what I wanted so something interesting and REAL could occur. I was so sick and tired of listening to these characters bitch and moan about being rich (but unwilling to purchase new show more glasses and complaining about being frivolous on their trip(S) to Europe), being smart (but making idiotic choices and lacking common sense and only talking about how smart they are), and being in love when each character wasn't capable because they spent their energy on only loving themselves. I'm really disappointed in this novel after reading Virgin Suicides and saving Middlesex for a rainy day, but at least I still have the Pulitzer winner.
Only positive thing I can say, is to thank Mr. Eugenides for discussing literature so frequently in his novel as it has increased my to-read list. But mind you, I was only intrigued by the third-person omniscient narrator, not by Madeleine's naive concept of the world. show less