"Finally!!! The wait is over," our delighted Miki says.

The Marriage Plot

It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.


As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus—who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.


Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.


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? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.


Miki says:

"Finally!!! The wait is over.  Jeffery Eugenides has finally written another novel.  My copy of his last novel, Middlesex, is literally falling to pieces on my shelf because I have read it so many times and made so many others read it too.  So, you can understand my relief at having new material from him.

 

The Marriage Plot is set in the 1980s at Brown University.  The story centers on Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell.  Madeleine is an English major obsessed with Jane Austen, semiotics, and love.  Leonard is a brilliant scientist with charisma.  Mitchell is the sweet guy who never stands out and never takes the girl home at the end of the night.  Together, these three form a love triangle that questions the modern ideas of love and relationships. 

In a generation where women are created equal, marriage has lost its value, romance is non-existent, and love is considered to be a meaningless word, Madeleine must navigate her way through the painful world without the elements that she has become accustomed to in the novels that she reads.

Further complicating Madeleine’s journey is her relationship status.  Is it possible to be in love if you believe that saying you love someone has no value?  Is love worth having if romance is missing? 

 

Although the relationships between these people are the focus of this novel, one of Eugenides’ amazing talents is creating a world that the reader can be lost in.  The parallels between the era in this novel and the current circumstances in America and its colleges are easy to recognize.  Eugenides filled this novel with literary references, cultural references, and even autobiographical references.  It will be enjoyable for any lover of literature. 

Although The Marriage Plot is very different from Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, the writing is still impeccable and delicious.  I can’t wait to read it again and again!"