Hi everyone!
Pulitzer Prize-winning American writer Jeffrey Eugenides' newest novel "The Marriage Plot" is one of those books that I want to recommend, yet at the same time I'm hesitant. There is much that is good here--better than good actually. Mr. Eugenides writes beautiful, lyrical prose that is so precisely and perfectly constructed you find yourself continuing to turn pages even as his intellectual tangents (of which there are many) and his all too wise-beyond-their years early twentysomething characters threaten to bore the reader to tears. "The Marriage Plot" is a novel that starts off strong and then proceeds for the next 406 pages to alternately delight and frustrate before finally coming together in the last fifty or so pages in a way that makes the whole thing somewhat worthwhile.
The story isn't particularly original. In the early 1980s Madeleine, a precocious Brown University co-ed with a love for Victorian literature falls in love with an intellectual bad boy named Leonard while Mitchell, another precocious college kid marginally interested in religious studies, pines after her and secretly hopes that one day Madeleine will come to her senses, dump Leonard, and marry him. Of course this is an oversimplification, but what it boils down to is a thematic similarity/parallel to the marriage-based plots of the Victorian novels Madeleine so dearly loves.
Along the way, the reader is treated to discourses on the microscopic mating rituals of yeast cells; semiotics; a deconstruction of the works of Derrida and Nietzsche; Quakers; sex; the charitable works of Mother Theresa; more sex; marriage as portrayed in the works of Austen, Trollope, and Gaskell; Islamic divorce proceedings; and ultimately the symptoms and various treatments of advanced manic depression. This is a lot to pack into an average-length novel centered around characters that aren't particularly interesting and are too clever (or not clever as the case may be) by half. And I couldn't help but wonder as I was reading whether all of these tangents served only to distract the reader from the fact that for much of the novel, there isn't a whole lot going on.
Yet...yet...I continue to admire Mr. Eugenides' writing. By the end, "The Marriage Plot" manages to rise above its characters' pretensions and pseudo-intellectual angst to the point where you actually start to care just a little about what happens to the Madeleine--Leonard--Mitchell love triangle. Will Madeleine overcome her naive and wholly literary belief that love conquers all? Will Leonard overcome the many demons that plague him to allow himself to love and be loved while realizing his full intellectual potential? Will Mitchell find the religious enlightenment that forever seems to be just beyond the grasp of his fingertips? You'll have to read the novel to find out.
I'm a big fan of Mr. Eugenides' two previous novels, the hauntingly beautiful "The Virgin Suicides" and the epic Pulitzer Prize winning "Middlesex." For me, "The Marriage Plot" lacks the emotional impact and heft of these earlier novels, and given the nearly unanimous rapturous reviews "The Marriage Plot" received upon its publication late last year, I couldn't help but be disappointed. Sure, there are moments where this novel soars, particularly when it focuses on Mitchell's spiritual journey across Europe and India. I think this is in no small part due to the fact that of these three characters, Mitchell feels the most fully developed and sympathetic. In my opinion, his is the greatest journey. Madeleine and Leonard remain too steeped in their own intellectual and mental crises to garner much support, though I will concede that I did come to feel a bit sorry for both, particularly in the novel's final fifty or so pages, but not enough to make me actually care about them.
So you can see my dilemma. I want to recommend "The Marriage Plot" because I respect Mr. Eugenides as a writer, yet ultimately its characters and comparatively thin plot undid it for me. I'm glad I stuck with it but I'd probably have been better off re-reading "Middlesex" instead.
Ciao.
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