Calibre library
Rating: ***
Tags: Fiction, General, Contemporary, Literary, Psychological, Triangles (Interpersonal relations), Romance, Fiction.Contemporary, Self-Actualization (Psychology), Literature, Literature - Appreciation, Self-Actualization, Appreciation, Lang:en
Summary
A
New York Times Notable Book of 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.
Amazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011:
Even among authors, Jeffrey Eugenides possesses a rare talent
for being able to inhabit his characters. In
The Marriage Plot, his third novel and first in ten
years (following the Pulitzer Prize-winning
Middlesex), Eugenides describes a year or so in the
lives of three college seniors at Brown in the early 80s. There
is Madeleine, a self-described “incurable romantic”
who is slightly embarrassed at being so normal. There is
Leonard, a brilliant, temperamental student from the Pacific
Northwest. And completing the triangle is Mitchell, a Religious
Studies major from Eugenides’ own Detroit. What follows
is a book delivered in sincere and genuine prose, tracing the
end of the students’ college days and continuing into
those first, tentative steps toward true adulthood. This is a
thoughtful and at times disarming novel about life, love, and
discovery, set during a time when so much of life seems filled
with deep portent.
--Chris Schluep
Praise for
The Marriage Plot: “Wry, engaging and beautifully constructed.”
—William Deresiewicz,
The New York Times Book Review
“[
The Marriage Plot] is sly, fun entertainment, a
confection for English majors and book lovers . . . Mr.
Eugenides brings the period into bright detail—the brands
of beer, the music, the affectations—and his send-ups of
the pretensions of chic undergraduate subcultures are hilarious
and charmingly rendered . . . [His] most mature and
accomplished book so far” —Sam Sacks,
Wall Street Journal
“No one’s more adept at channeling teenage angst
than Jeffrey Eugenides. Not even J. D. Salinger . . .
It’s in mapping Mitchell’s search for some sort of
belief that might fill the spiritual hole in his heart and
Madeleine’s search for a way to turn her passion for
literature into a vocation that this novel is at its most
affecting, reminding us with uncommon understanding what it is
to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love and in love
with books and ideas.” —Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
“This is a story about being young and bright and
lost, a story Americans have been telling since
Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises. Our exceptionally well-read but
largely untested graduates still wonder: How should I live my
life? What can I really believe in? Whom should I love?
Literature has provided a wide range of answers to those
questions—Lose Lady Brett! Give up on Daisy! Go with Team
Edward!—but in the end, novels aren’t really very
good guidebooks. Instead, they’re a chance to exercise
our moral imagination, and this one provides an exceptionally
witty and poignant workout.” —Ron Charles,
The Washington Post
“If there is a writer to whom Eugenides appears
connected, it is not Wallace but Jonathan Franzen. They are
less than a year apart in age, and while Franzen got a head
start, the two, who are both with the same publisher, are on
similar publishing schedules. Last year, Franzen's
Freedom was a bestseller; like
The Marriage Plot, it's a robust, rich story of adults
in a love triangle. Eugenides benefits by the comparison: This
book is sweeter, kinder, with a more generous heart. What's
more, it is layered with exactly the kinds of things that
people who love novels will love.” —Carolyn
Kellogg,
Los Angeles Times
“Eugenides steers effortlessly through the
intertwining tales of his three protagonists, shifting
seamlessly among their three viewpoints and overlapping their
stories in a way that's easy to follow and never labored. His
prose is smooth but never flashy, and his eye for the telling
detail or gesture is keen. Slowly but confidently he fleshes
out his characters, and as they slowly accrue weight and
realism, readers will feel increasingly opinionated about the
choices they make . . . It's heavy stuff, but Eugenides
distinguishes himself from too many novelists who seem to think
a somber tone equates to a serious purpose.
The Marriage Plot is fun to read and ultimately
affirming.” —Patrick Condon,
San Francisco Chronicle
“Eugenides, a master storyteller, has a remarkable way
of twisting his narrative in a way that seems effortless;
taking us backward and forward in time to fill in details . . .
For these characters, who don't live in Jane Austen's world, no
simple resolution will do for them in the world. And yet you
close this book with immense satisfaction—falling in love
just a bit yourself, with a new kind of marriage plot.”
—Moira Macdonald,
Seattle Times
“Jeffrey Eugenides, in his glorious new novel, mines
our thrall and eternal unease around sex, love and marriage . .
. At its core,
The Marriage Plot is besotted with books, flush with
literary references. It seems coyly designed to become the
volume all former English majors take to their breasts.”
—Karen Long,
The Plain Dealer
“There has been a storybook quality to much American
fiction recently—larger-than-life, hyper-exuberant, gaudy
like the superhero comics and fairy tales that have inspired
it. By sticking to ordinary human truth, Eugenides has bucked
this trend and written his most powerful book yet.”
—Zachary Lazar,
Newsday
“Befitting [Eugenides’s] status as that rare
author who bridges both highbrow book clubs and best-seller
lists, his third novel is a grand romance in the Austen
tradition—one that also deconstructs the very idea of why
we'd still find pleasure in such a timeworn narrative style.
It's a book that asks why we love to read, yet is so
relentlessly charming, smart and funny that it answers its own
question.” —David Daley,
USA TODAY
“There are serious pleasures here for people who love
to read.” —Leah Greenblatt,
Entertainment Weekly
“Eugenides's first novel since 2002's Pulitzer
Prize–winning
Middlesex so impressively, ambitiously breaks the mold
of its predecessor that it calls for the founding of a new
prize to recognize its success both as a novel—and as a
Jeffrey Eugenides novel. Importantly but unobtrusively set in
the early 1980s, this is the tale of Madeleine Hanna, recent
Brown University English grad, and her admirer Mitchell
Grammaticus, who opts out of Divinity School to walk the earth
as an ersatz pilgrim. Madeleine is equally caught up, both with
the postmodern vogue (Derrida, Barthes)—conflicting with
her love of James, Austen, and Salinger—and with the
brilliant Leonard Bankhead, whom she met in semiotics class and
whose fits of manic depression jeopardize his suitability as a
marriage prospect. Meanwhile, Mitchell winds up in Calcutta
working with Mother Theresa's volunteers, still dreaming of
Madeleine. In capturing the heady spirit of youthful intellect
on the verge, Eugenides revives the coming-of-age novel for a
new generation The book's fidelity to its young heroes and to a
superb supporting cast of enigmatic professors, feminist
theorists, neo-Victorians, and concerned mothers, and all of
their evolving investment in ideas and ideals is such that the
central argument of the book is also its solution: the old
stories may be best after all, but there are always new ways to
complicate them.” —
Publisher’s Weekly (starred review) “In Eugenides’ first novel since the Pulitzer
Prize–winning
Middlesex (2002), English major and devotee of classic
literature Madeleine Hanna is a senior at Reagan-era Brown
University. Only when curiosity gets the best of her does she
belly up to Semiotics 211, a bastion of postmodern liberalism,
and meet handsome, brilliant, mysterious Leonard Bankhead.
Completing a triangle is Madeleine’s friend Mitchell, a
clear-eyed religious-studies student who believes himself her
true intended. Eugenides’ drama unfolds over the next
year or so. His characteristically deliberate, researched
realization of place and personality serve him well, and he
strikes perfectly tuned chords by referring to works ranging
from Barthes’
Lovers’ Discourse to Bemelmans’
Madeline books for children. The remarkably à
propos title refers to the subject of Madeleine’s honors
thesis, which is the Western novel’s doing and undoing,
in that, upon the demise, circa 1900, of the marriage plot, the
novel ‘didn’t mean much anymore,’ according
to Madeleine’s professor and, perhaps, Eugenides. With
this tightly, immaculately self-contained tale set upon pillars
at once imposing and of dollhouse scale, namely, academia
(‘College wasn’t like the real world,’
Madeleine notes) and the emotions of the youngest of
twentysomethings, Eugenides realizes the novel whose
dismantling his characters examine.”
—Annie Bostrom,
Booklist (starred review) “A stunning novel—erudite, compassionate and
penetrating in its analysis of love relationships. Eugenides
focuses primarily on three characters, who all graduate from
Brown in 1982. One of the pieces of this triangle is Madeleine
Hanna, who finds herself somewhat embarrassed to have emerged
from a “normal” household in New Jersey (though we
later find out the normality of her upbringing is only
relative). She becomes enamored with Leonard, a brilliant but
moody student, in their Semiotics course, one of the texts
being, ironically, Roland Barthes’
A Lover’s Discourse, which Madeleine finds
disturbingly problematic in helping her figure out her own love
relationship. We discover that Leonard had been diagnosed with
bipolar disorder during his first year at Brown, and his
struggle with mood swings throughout the novel is both titanic
and tender. The third major player is Mitchell, a Religious
Studies major who is also attracted to Madeleine but whose
reticence she finds both disturbing and incomprehensible. On
graduation day, Leonard has a breakdown and is hospitalized in
a mental-health ward, and Madeleine shows her commitment by
skipping the festivities and seeking him out. After graduation,
Leonard and Madeleine live together when Leonard gets an
internship at a biology lab on Cape Cod, and the spring after
graduation they marry, when Leonard is able to get his mood
swings under temporary control. Meanwhile Mitchell, who takes
his major seriously, travels to India seeking a path—and
briefly finds one when he volunteers to work with the dying in
Calcutta. But Mitchell’s road to self-discovery
eventually returns him to the States—and opens another
opportunity for love that complicates Madeleine’s life.
Dazzling work—Eugenides continues to show that he is one
of t...
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
Amazon.com Review
Review