I liked the Marriage Plot a lot, but is it just my personal circumstances? It’s a book about three students about to graduate from Brown in 1982. I graduated in 1981. It felt incredibly familiar.
Madeleine Hanna majors in English, but is seduced by Semiotics. (I was not, but it was in the air.) Mitchell Grammaticus majors in Religious Studies. (I took many religious studies classes.) Eugenides nails what it was like to be at Brown. He nails what it was like to be anybody there, convinced that other people knew exactly the things that you did not know, and which you needed to know in order to know anything at all. He also nails what it was like to graduate, having no idea what you’d do. The beginning, where those things happen, is probably the best written part.
I like the marriage plot idea. Madeleine writes her thesis on the marriage plot, which I presume is just the plot — common to Shakespeare’s comedies and to many of the novels I read in college — where all conflicts are resolved at the end by a marriage. What does this mean? It was a major moment of discovery for me when I realized that this was such a common plot trajectory. I’m glad to know that this thing has a name.
I think Eugenides also nails what we felt at the time — that what we were studying had a direct relevance to our lives — closer than that, even. Madeleine’s love affair with Leonard is shaped by, and can be understood through, her reading of Roland Barthes. Mitchell tries to understand India through Thomas Merton and the Jesus prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” It was Ulysses for me. I read Ulysses and I had found the road map for my life.
It’s a very novelly book. The marriage plot is part of this plot as well, and in fact there’s a great reference to Ulysses buried here — turned on its head, actually. Mitchell’s prayer seems, in a very secular way, to encapsulate one theme of the book. The heroes have to learn eventually that perfection and the ideal are impossible — we’re all just sinners and flawed human beings doing the best we can. Growing up, of course, is learning just that, so we’re dealing more with the coming of age plot rather than the marriage plot — although, in someone like Jane Austen, or in Middlemarch, are those actually the same thing? And part of growing up, I suppose, is learning that the marriage plot may resolve all conflict in books, but probably not in real life.
It’s probably not a perfect book. In some parts it felt more like we were being filled in on the back story. I can contrast it here with Tinker, Tailor where you are shown many things and discover what’s going on rather than having Leonard come in and just describe himself and his view of things. But I’m a sucker for a novelly book that references novels, especially novels I love. And I’m a sucker for those particular characters, who are so much like people I knew, including myself, at that time of life when we were all just figuring stuff out.
Well, now I may have to try this. And after I’d decided not to. But…a novel about novels? Who can resist that kind of build-up?
I know!
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I liked that part of it too. I graduated from a different New England college a few years later, an English major who alternated between thinking she was brilliant and utterly stupid. This book felt very familiar to me too. I loved the novelly bits, but I found the female lead, whose name I tellingly can’t remember with certainty — Madeleine? A Proustian reference? — to feel too much like a plot device. And I lose a little respect for male writers who don’t seem to bother to make female characters real. It’s a problem Eugenides has in general I think, but it worked to his advantage in the Virgin Suicides, where the girls were supposed to be mysterious and untouchable. Mitchell was a fantastic character and I was glad to know him. Without him, I think the story would have been all clever architecture with nothing touching the ground. I found the parts where Leonard and girl were at his internship to be tedious. But I thought the ending was utterly perfect. He just didn’t quite lead me there. The word on the street is that Leonard was inspired by David Foster Wallace. I’m not sure if that adds anything to my reading or not.
Ah. I read an interview with him where he denied that, but hadn’t heard the rumor to begin with. I did not think madeleine seemed unreal, though. In fact she could have been my friend a. She might have got a bit thin toward the middle – although her experience tagging along with Leonard sort of mirrors mine after college- but I found her pretty convincing. More convincing than those suicides certainly.
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