SEE LIFE / PAGES
Late summer reads By Michael Morrissey THE MARRIAGE PLOT By Jeffrey Eugenides Fourth Estate, $37
Who said the serious novel of romance is dead? Maybe no one but very so often, a burnt out novelist or a semiotician wants to inform us the novel itself is terminally ill or irrelevant which seems to me a bit like saying the world is running out of oxygen. Semiotics – and there are many telling attacks on it in the opening chapters as the two main characters grapple with it in the early 80s university environment – along with the deluge of personal growth books, tabloid-style books on scandal, the numerous badly written sword & sorcery novels can never replace the serious novel. The Marriage Plot is then a lovely reminder and proof of one of my deeply felt convictions. The nominally dominant plot has Madeleine writing a thesis on the novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot with the contention that the “marriage plot” underscores the greatest of English novels which, I guess, is bad news for Dickens and Conrad. Romance-loving Madeleine Hanna is torn between two young men – Leonard
Bankhead, a hyperfluent genius type who turns out to be a manic depressive, and Mitchell Grammaticus, a steadier but duller fellow who winds up in Calcutta assisting Mother Teresa volunteers. Like so many hopeful idealists, he doesn’t last the distance. Manic depression hasn’t figured prominently in fiction or even non-fiction but now seems to be coming into its own (schizophrenia has had its heyday) – and Eugenides’ evocation of it is amongst the most accurate in contemporary literature. Madeleine is arguably a less intriguing character than Leonard – though the polarity between semiotics and romance is always crystalline – but then it is her role to be confused and undecided about the man or the life that is best for her. After all, she is a young university student and such confusion is more or less normal. In the end she chooses unexpectedly and we sense that in a positive way, she has plenty more life to lead. Clever, charming, relevant, lucid, insightful, dense with Americana, and multi-layered in narrative, The Marriage Plot is a satisfying read that ends with the loveliest word in the English language, yes. To which I can only add, Amen.
84 INVESTIGATEMAGAZINE.COM Feb/March 2012
THE CATASTROPHE
By Ian Wedde Victoria University Press, $35.00 Ian Wedde emerged with the Freed group of poets in the late 60s and has been a prominent contributor to the poetry scene ever since. He has a more modest profile as a short story writer but has also achieved prominence as a novelist. His magnum opus, Symmes Hole, was an ambitious whale of a book – about whaling – and the complicated narrative structure and abundant poetic style have so far amiably defeated me. Time for another go? Later novels were less expansive in scope but also tended to deploy an overly poetic style to the detriment of readability. With The Catastrophe, his sixth novel, he has produced a straightforward thriller which is more direct in style and plot and imminently more readable. Christopher Hare is a highly successful and highly bored food writer. And in case you haven’t realised it, sumptuous displays of food are the new porn. His former girlfriend, known as Le Glace, is one of the new breed of burgeoning food photographers. But