Book Review: The Marriage Plot

One of the best books ever, IMHO, is Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, which won this American author the Pulitzer Prize in 2003.  That was my first introduction to this author, who is perhaps best known for writing The Virgin Suicides, which was made into a great movie directed by Sofia Coppola.  His newest novel, his third, is The Marriage Plot, which takes place in 1982 and involves a college love triangle between a young woman doing her senior English thesis on the “marriage plots” of Victorian novels and two vastly different young men.

Madeleine Hanna, on the cusp of graduating from Brown University, is your typical middle class American girl attending and Ivy League college, though she’s a bit too obsessed with Victorian novels at at time when the hipper people of her class are more into Derrida (whoever that is!).  This rather unhip focus eventually comes to play out in Madeleine’s real life, when she signs up for a semiotics class, also attended by Leonard Bankhead, a “charismatic loner” who, when we first meet him, spits chewing tobacco into a coffee cup during class, and Mitchell Grammaticus, who is a Religious Studies major into Christian mysticism.  Predictably, this love triangle doesn’t work out for any of them; Madeleine chooses the wrong guy for the wrong reasons while the more compatible man is left out in the cold, yearning for a woman he can’t have.  Blahx3.  As is typical, Madeleine goes for the dark, mysterious, loner, bad-boy Leonard, who suffers from quite sever bipolar disorder, though she doesn’t know this until after their relationship starts, and she sticks with him through thick and thin, ignoring her own needs because seeing to Leonard’s needs serve the purpose of distracting her from much deeper issues, like what she’s going to do with her life after graduation, etc.  Leonard, who we come to learn is rather adept at manipulation, asks her to marry him because he sees Madeleine as a ticket to financial stability at a time when he sees the writing on the wall when it comes to his own future career.  Meanwhile, Mitchell embarks on a journey through Europe and into India to both escape his feelings for Madeleine and to find spiritual enlightenment.  At the end, everything unravels for Madeleine and Leonard in a dramatic way, and Mitchell has to come to terms with the fact that Madeleine isn’t the right woman for him after all.

The ending is a bit of a divergence from the marriage plots I’m familiar with, where either the woman settles for the man who wants her for the wrong reasons because she either believes she’s a martyr for living with him or believes no one else will want her, and the other corner of the triangle has to suck it and winds up in a pattern of unfulfilling relationships that all fall apart because no one can measure up to his ideal love.  Everyone ends up miserable but they pretend everything is hunky dory anyway and go on to have messed up kids.

Thank God Eugenides does not go that route.  I couldn’t have borne it if he had.  The ending of this book was by far the best part of it.  It was quite a page-turner and it kept me guessing how things would be resolved right up till the end.  Unfortunately, the rest of the book was a little boring.

Madeleine as the heroine was somewhat interesting but not overly so.  I found Leonard annoying, even though I think Eugenides’s portrayal of Leonard’s bipolar experiences were excellently rendered.  You know he’s all wrong for Madeleine right from the start, and I found myself frustrated with his antics and her naivite.  Mitchell was an OK character, and I remember being in university with a lot of people like him – academic, philosophical stars who could talk your leg off about really obscure stuff but didn’t have the greatest social skills ever.  Yet, I had sympathy for him because he was sincere in his intentions towards Madeleine and was an all around nice guy.  Which only made Madeleine’s choice all the more irritating.

What saved this book for me was Jeffrey Eugenides’s prose.  It’s so fantastic!  He’s witty, drily sarcastic, humourous, and has great one-liners.  His prose in Middlesex was one of the best parts of that book and that’s what makes Eugenides one of my favourite writers.  I love snappy, witty prose.  Here are some examples.

“English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.”

“Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking that Madeleine’s natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan.”

“In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”

“If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely.”

The other issue I had with this book was that much of it is told in flashbacks, and at times the flashbacks are so long that I forgot what was happening in the present tense and what the context of the flashback was.  Additionally, Eugenides had some rough transitions between his flashbacks and his present that added to the confusion.

I just couldn’t help but feel let down by this book, especially after the epic nature of Middlesex.  It’s not a bad read, just not a great one; if you want to read any Eugenides, I’d go with Middlesex over this one.  I have yet to read The Virgin Suicides, though after seeing the movie several times, I’m not sure I want to; I found the story quite disturbing.

Anyway, that’s my two cents.  If you’re a writer and want plenty of examples of great prose, however, Eugenides is your guy.