"The Marriage Plot," by Jeffrey Eugenides

Why I Have Just Read “The Marriage Plot” (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011), by Jeffrey Eugenides:

1. I was intrigued by the originality of, and liked reading, the author’s two earlier novels, “The Virgin Suicides” and “Middlesex.”
2. It had been nine years since the author’s last novel, “Middlesex,” was published, so there was much anticipation of this new novel.
3. As I said in my 11/13/11 post, there has been much speculation about whether “The Marriage Plot” is based on the author’s real-life famous writer friends; is it a roman a clef? And if so, which character is “really” which writer friend? I am certainly not immune to this kind of literary speculation (gossip?).
4. I am a pushover for novels about a group of friends in college (or elsewhere) and how their ensuing lives and relationships play out in the years after college. In the case of this novel, the characters meet at Brown University; the novel focuses on the college years and on the eventful year immediately after they graduate.
5. Most of all, the title is irresistible to me; it refers to the common plot of Regency and Victorian novels, especially those by women writers such as Austen and Eliot. One of the main characters, Madeleine, is a classic English major type, enchanted and absorbed by the joys, complexities, and insights provided by literature, and eager to pursue a career of scholarship in English literature. This is a very familiar “type” for me! Soon Madeleine is involved in her own “marriage plot,” but it is very different from those in her beloved novels. How does this plot play out in our current culture? In the old novels, marriage often (with the notable exception of Eliot’s “Middlemarch”) concluded the stories; nowadays we want to know what happens AFTER marriage as well.

I was not disappointed by the novel. (Sometimes a novel that is hyped this much is a disappointment.) I was immediately caught up in it, from the first page, which consisted of a cataloging of the books in Madeleine’s room, including those by Wharton, James, Dickens, Trollope, Austen, Eliot, the Brontes, H.D., Levertov, and Colette. (Madeleine’s bookshelf looks a lot like mine....) The three main characters, with their complicated relationships, as well as the supporting cast of fellow students, parents, professors, and employers, are recognizable and compelling; the plot turns are both believable and at times surprising; the writing is engaging.