Staff Pick
Addressing the ubiquitous love triangle, The Marriage Plot is a perfectly executed character study of three college students — Leonard, Madeleine, and Mitchell — who, variously, are a couple, are not a couple, were a couple, were never a couple, or were almost a couple. Ah, young love! However, absolutely nothing Eugenides writes is frivolous or insubstantial. The painful sucker punch delivered in both Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides is absent from The Marriage Plot, but the book doesn't miss it. The Marriage Plot is long on emotion and so accurately reflects private expressions of angst, love, regret, and need that it feels like reading someone's diary (or maybe your own). Taking on subjects as enormous as mental illness, classism, meaningful work, religious faith, higher education, charity, self-knowledge, and the nature of relationships, The Marriage Plot asks, Is it sometimes better to not get what you want? Eugenides is a masterful writer who doesn't shy away from uncomfortable emotions, and in his hands everyday issues reveal a deep and complex truth. Once again, the very long wait between his books has definitely been worth it. Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The long-awaited new novel from the Pultizer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides.
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
-- Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers
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 Morten--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 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.