Book Reviews
But from the first words of the novel, Eugenides veers sharply away from anything else that might be expected of him. The opening line telegraphs a very different sort of story: “To start with, look at all the books.” Madeleine’s books, in particular, and like most English majors, she’s a bookhound: A lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot and the redoubtabl Brontë sisters… the Colette novels she read on the sly… the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade... In The Marriage Plot, books are everything, but Madeleine’s books are especially important considering the setting. This isn’t just any old college graduation. This is the early 1980s, and Madeleine is a traditional sort of girl caught up in a time when her fellow students were calling on Derrida and Barthes to break down narrative, and Madeleine must balance that with the books she loves—books with stories that hinge on the importance of marriage. The Marriage Plot is a marriage plot novel about the sensibility of marriage plots (and relationships themselves) in the post-marriage
era of divorce and pre-nups, and if that isn’t enough to get you thinking in circles, throw in those three very disparate characters, give them all their own point-of-view sections, add a dash of thrice-told events á la Rashomon (with rather less violence), a few charmingly twisted literary tropes, a generous helping of lit-crit philosophy, and the result is something like studying for a grad level English class while marathoning updated treatments of Austen on DVD. Eugenides is working with a plot that seems familiar, one built through and around the Regency and Victorian novels Madeleine adores. She must deal with a man—Leonard— who rejects and reclaims her, and a man who seems like a better match—Mitchell—but who loves her ineffectually from afar. To boot she’s graced (or saddled) with parents, Alton and Phyllida, who seem to have stepped right out of Austen and into a WASPy East Coast country club. The novel strikes a nice balance between the exploration of narrative and post-structuralist sensibilities, particularly as Madeleine reads and re-reads Barthes in an effort to make sense of her relationship with Leonard; she looks to Barthes for explanations (even as she decries some of them) when she and Leonard are together, and for comfort after they go
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