Courtesy
of Beaverdale Books
Review by Barb Palar
By Jeffrey Eugenides
Published by Picador USA
9/4/2012
$16
406 pp
Jeffrey Eugenides… Hmm, sounds familiar. Oh
yeah, he’s the guy who wrote the wildly popular
“Middlesex.” Oh, and also “Virgin Suicides.”
Really? Well, I wonder which one of those two
very different pieces of work his latest novel
will more closely resemble. The answer? Neither.
So, whether you loved or hated either of his
previous books, there’s a chance you could also
love or hate “The Marriage Plot.”
“It’s a coming-of-age tale and love triangle
of a young woman and two young men who have
just graduated from Brown University in 1982.
Eugenides, in an NPR interview, lamented the
fact that he was born too late to weave a Jane
Austen-style tale of finding a suitable marriage
partner. He soaks this regret in the form of
this book’s female character, Madeleine, who
is somewhat obsessed with Austen and has written
her senior thesis about Austen’s work. Madeleine
finds herself torn between two loves: Leonard,
a manic-depressive biology major, and Mitchell,
who is into Christian mysticism and believes
that he and Maddy are destined for each other.
Madeleine and Leonard head to Cape Cod to move
in together, while Mitchell is off to India
to work with Mother Teresa. As the three move
from campus to the “real world,” they discover
— as most of us do — that they have been living
on some sort of parallel planet for four years
and that they need to not only rediscover, but
also reinvent, who they have become and the
paths they will now take, individually or together.
Madeleine, a product of her era (as is Eugenides),
has studied the concept of love and marriage
so thoroughly in college that she has become
skeptical of it. Yet she finds herself falling
in love. Her observations of her own parents’
relationship and her frustration with them add
to her angst. CV |