Madeleine Hanna loves books. On the very first page of “The Marriage Plot,” Jeffrey Eugenides shows us her bookshelves, full of old-fashioned authors—Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, Dickens, Henry James—whose works are meant to mark her as both a serious reader and an “incurable romantic.” On the next few pages, we discover that Madeleine has just woken up in last night’s clothes, with a terrible hangover and a mysterious stain on her dress, on the morning of her college graduation. For the reader, it’s a promising begin.
In the less than promising year 1982, Madeleine is getting ready to leave the hothouse of an American university, with no job prospects in sight. To make things complicated, she’s in love with Leonard, a tall, dark, and handsome biologist, while Mitchell, a self-doubting student of philosophy, has his heart set on Madeleine.
Books ought to help Madeleine here, but she’s been learning in her English courses that the love story has lost its meaning. Her professor teaches her that the great subject of the 19th-century novel, courtship and marriage, is dead. “What would it matter whom [Austen’s] Emma married if she could file for separation later?”
Besides, the novel itself is dying. Madeleine’s classmates are busy reading literary theorists like Derrida and Eco, who claim that fiction has nothing left to say. Contemporary writers can never express an original emotion, they argue, because it will always come out like a line in an earlier book. “Books aren’t about ‘real life,’” a black-clad fellow student explains. “Books are about other books.”
So you have the 19th-century novel, with its tidy endings, and 20th-century literary theory, which encourages distrust for fiction’s illusion of order. Having juxtaposed the two, Eugenides then takes a third road. “The Marriage Plot” is a triangular love story with an open conclusion that takes place in a world of irony and no commitment.
Eugenides is an exuberant, inventive writer. His previous two books were “The Virgin Suicides,” a dark, moody coming-of-age novel, and “Middlesex,” a big, colorful, energetic saga about the American immigrant experience, forbidden and impossible loves, and youthful gender confusion. “The Marriage Plot” is equally concerned with young people on the brink of adulthood. It’s less fantastic than “Middlesex” and more intimate, but no less ambitious: Eugenides is out to defy the professors and philosophers by showing that the novel itself still matters.
“The Marriage Plot” follows its characters through college and into the first year afterward, as they try to make sense of their sexuality and begin their adult lives. Over her parents’ objections, Madeleine moves in with Leonard, drawn to his magnetic intensity. But Leonard suffers from manic depression, swinging drastically between charismatic brilliance and depressions that “colonized every cell of his body, a concentrate of anguish seemingly secreted, drip by drip, into his veins.” Through this character, apparently based in part on the late writer David Foster Wallace, Eugenides gives a harrowing depiction of bipolar illness.
Mitchell tries to find himself through travel. In Paris he clashes with Claire, a beautiful, furry-legged, Kristeva-reading feminist who criticizes him for opening a book by the “misogynist… murderer of wild animals” Ernest Hemingway. (Of all the book’s characters, Claire was to me the most endearingly, and embarrassingly, familiar.) In Calcutta, he meets other seekers for spiritual enlightenment but fails to find it for himself.
Scene by scene, the book is never less than appealing, but as a whole it feels a little flat. Madeleine in particular is a problem. She’s popular, conventional, “a positive, privileged, sheltered, exemplary person.” Aside from love, there’s nothing she wants. And other than feeling sorry for Leonard, she has no moral depth; when she mistreats Mitchell she feels not a single pang of conscience.
In other words, she pales in comparison with the emotionally complex and subtly rebellious heroines of the books she studies. In fact, she’s the type of self-satisfied, pretty young woman that Austen and Eliot couldn’t stand: Elizabeth Bennet would have eaten her for breakfast. I suspect she started out her literary existence, not as a well-rounded character, but as an unattainable love object. To write a novel in which the love object, instead of the pining lover, is the main character is an interesting twist, but Eugenides doesn’t make it work.
Even the narrative feels as twitchy as a college kid strung out on reading and ego. It’s full of flashbacks and shifts in tone from serious to ironic, as if the author still can’t make up his mind what to think of his callow protagonists. Eugenides raises interesting questions about the uses of literature, religion, romance, and irony—not to mention the value of a college education. Then he shrugs his shoulders and lets the questions go unanswered. Ultimately “The Marriage Plot” is as charming and as trivial as its characters, these bright kids who believe they can live “real life” in quotation marks—but who secretly want to drop their ironic pose and fall in love.
Happily married
Jeffrey Eugenides (Detroit, 1960) has written only two previous novels, “The Virgin Suicides” (1993) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Middlesex” (2001). In “The Marriage Plot” he takes a turn toward autobiography: the book is set at Brown University, the Ivy League college from which Eugenides graduated in 1982. Eugenides, like his character Mitchell, went to Calcutta to volunteer at Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying, with disappointing results. Unlike Mitchell, however, the author is happily married, has a daughter and lives and teaches in Princeton, New Jersey.
Trouw, November 30, 2011. Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (New York: FSG, 2011).