The Marriage Plot: A Novel

Jeffrey Eugenides

Oct 2011 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

About this ebook

A New York Times Notable Book of 2011
A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011
A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title
One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011
A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title
One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011

It's the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus—who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Ratings and reviews

So very disappointed especially since Middlesex is my absolute favorite book. The Virgin Suicides is also high on my list. I'm not sure if it's the fact that the character development wasn't good or I just hated the characters themselves. I couldn't identify with any of them which was frustrating to me since that has been the gift of the author in his two previous books. The quality of writing wasn't nearly to the level of his other books. I felt the story was too forced.

In some places the story flowed beautifully, in others it lagged by the intentional use of literary references that truly did not belong and use of large seemingly stuffy "highly intellectual" words. Again, they seemed out of place. The high educational levels of these characters did not make the use of the vocabulary any more natural. And, it had nothing to do with the story. It bogged it down if anything. It feels like the intellectual references and extreme use of ‘isms’ were just thrown in there for good measure. I kept waiting for the author to tie everything up, but that never happened. You can’t tie a book up in one page. Very anti-climactic. I would not recommend this book and am saddened by that fact.

A 21st century soap opera with Maddy searching for a Victorian marriage with all the trimmings from 21st teenage men seeking their own identity and security. A definite let-down. J.P. Miller. Cambridge, MA

About the author

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.