The Marriage Plot

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I liked this book but it fell victim to the year of unfinished book club books.

Could have kept reading this book forever. I got completely lost in this one. All the characters felt very real to me, and relatable. Enjoyed for the same reasons I love Sally Rooney

400 pages of white people wanting so bad to be oppressed but just being completely incapable of properly communicating and caring for each other

i liked the itty bitty bits of love letters to literature, and how this book made fun of pretentious lit majors. but also this book is for those very pretentious lit majors lol

I disagree with the many who disliked this book. The fact that the protagonist is a well-off, white girl with an education doesn't make her feelings nor her story non-valid.

Not Eugenides' most gripping work, but still astounding in its ability to take the reader into a character's unique, inner life.

Это книга, которую я никому не буду советовать читать. Девочка, влюбленная в викторианскую литературу, мальчик, не на шутку увлекающийся религией, другой мальчик, страдающий от маниакальной депрессии, - что тут может быть интересного, даже если они между собой крепко связаны любовными чувствами? На самом деле, все. А советовать не хочу - потому что это великолепная книга на любителя таких вот треугольников, расположенных в плоскости юности и залитых душевными терзаниями.
Отчасти этот роман напомнил мне “Тайную историю” Донны Тарт - дело происходит в университете, все герои высокоинтеллектуальны и уже по-взрослому молоды - когда юность отступает и необходимо принимать на себя ответственность не только за уже совершенные поступки, но и за свое такое еще туманное будущее. Герои вступают в ту часть жизни, когда уже нельзя игнорировать свое взросление, нельзя бездумно тратить себя на развлечения; нужно задавать себе вопросы и отвечать на них, нужно принимать решения, обязательно ошибаться и продолжать искать свое место во взрослом мире. Наблюдать за их исканиями интересно и немного грустно - тот возраст, в котором находятся Мадлен, Митчелл и Леонард совсем еще недавно был моим; все вопросы слишком живо отдаются в памяти вереницей сомнений. Тем интереснее для меня такие книги, - невольно отождествляя себя с героями, можно снова пережить то прекрасное и порою грустное время своей жизни.

I liked the characters and stories of Leonard and Mitchell (the two suitors). The main character, Madeline, is rather thin by comparison (except in the imaginations of her suitors). I was drawn into the book and stayed up late to read the last 100 pages, but found it unsatisfying. At Madeline's final “yes”, I thought “OK, now her story can begin”, which is not that different from the feeling I have after the heroines in traditional “marriage plot” novels accept their marriage proposals, that it is dishonest to end the story there.

So, don't read this expecting to have a story about a woman. It's really a story about the suitors of a young college girl. The woman's story hasn't started yet.

The best novel I've read in years. I forgot that fiction could be fun as well as beautiful. Like maths.

This is one for the pretentious liberal arts majors. Of which I am one, so I liked it. Basically the whole time I was reading this I felt like I was preparing for a class I'm not actually taking. Again: which I liked. I mostly read this because my friends Sophi and Tara made me read it, and I thought it was interesting that each of the 3 of us strongly identified with a different one of the 3 protagonists. (Mine was Mitchell, who tried to save the world and gave up after 3 weeks.)

Many other reviewers captured my sentiments about this book, but I'll add a few cents anyway. I was lured in by the idea of a modern take on the marriage plot. Unlike the heroines in novels by Austen or the Brontes, however, Madeleine is an incredibly flat character. There's little presented to redeem her and I disagree with the author that she's the post-feminist representation of Emma Woodhouse or Elizabeth Bennet. Even when those characters behaved foolishly or unthinkingly, they realized the error of their ways and atoned for it or took off the blinders that hindered them. Madeleine is closest to Anna Karenina, in my opinion, because she's just a pretty shell trying to force what she can't have into the life she believes she ought to have, although she doesn't end up under a train. Perhaps, that's another reason she's so unsympathetic and dull. Leonard and Mitchell are somewhat more fleshed out, but they just can't breathe life into a book about nothing. A bigger problem with the book is the amount of time it takes to wade through needless exposition. Did I really need to wade through almost one CD for Madeleine to get up and open the door? Am I really supposed to believe that the important phone call Madeleine gets a few minutes before graduation didn't actually take an hour, as opposed to maybe 5 minutes in the book?? The entire sequence pre-graduation is quite ridiculous, in fact.

One useful fact gleaned from this book is that 7Up once contained lithium! So, there's that, and the audiobook version took up a several commuting hours.

I...wish I liked this more. I really loved both of Eugenides' other novels. I think I get where he was trying to go, with regard to tongues in cheeks, but my main struggle as a reader was with consistency. I felt grabbed once in a while, but variations in tone both within and across characters really left me feeling disconnected. I found myself wanting to finish not because I was desperate to find out how things wrapped up (too neatly, in my opinion), but because I wanted to stop reading. I feel sad about that. Finally, for the first time in reading Eugenides, I got the vibe that he's Franzen adjacent, which I don't mean as a compliment. I want more from fiction; in particular, I want bigger risks and more authorial commitment to them.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is about me. It's like he took the story of my life, added some more interesting parts, set it back in time and published it. As such, reading this book was a deeply personal experience.

The book follows me... I mean Madeleine (which is just one of the many superbly awesome names in the book) as she graduates from Brown in 1982 with a degree in English, hoping to go to grad school to further study 18th Century-literature. Her sometimes-friend Mitchell Grammaticus (seriously, how awesome is that name!) is a graduating religious studies major who is going to travel the world and hopefully not return until the recession is over. Madeleine's boyfriend Leonard Bankhead (probably the most accurate name, and I mean, really.) is supposed to graduate, but a hypomanic state lands him in the hospital after he missed enough classes to be forcibly dropped.

Speaking of mania, a major plot point in the book is Leonard's manic-depression (or, what is now called Bi-Polar disorder). Yet another example of Eugenides' bizarre ability to know my life. His portrayal of BP disorder is real and not such a big deal. Leonard is a superior asshole, but he was an asshole while he was on Lithium he was an asshole when he decided to stop Lithium, he was an asshole when not on Lithium, and guess what, he's an asshole on a different dose of Lithium. Not such a large character arc, but I'll get back to that in a minute.

While the story jumps from character to character a la Beloved, only it's clearer who is actually talking, the center focus is definitely Madeleine. Her struggles while living with Leonard and still trying to get into grad school after doing poorly on the GRE. The two men in the story are completely absorbed in Madeleine, trying to get her, keep her, please her and fuck her. In this way, The Marriage Plot is very similar to Eugenides's other works, especially The Virgin Suicides. Madeleine is placed on a pedestal by the two main men in her life, one that is not necessarily deserved and is hard for her to live up to. Both Leonard and Mitchell paint her as the perfect woman, loving and unselfish, but Madeleine knows that is not always the case.

The story continues on in this fashion, getting Madeleine's point of view of certain events, followed by Leonard's of the same event and Mitchell's experiences overseas. One thing all the stories have in common is the constant thought of Madeleine and Leonard.

Being ever the Eugenides book, no one is perfect. All of the actions are very real, making the book an exceptional experience of the brilliantly mundane. Sure, there are no sword fights or huge declarations of undying love, but there are seemingly real people living out the fictionally real lives to the best of their ability.

In the beginning of the book, I was rooting for Madeleine and Leonard to make the leap and become the couple for life, but then Leonard's asshole-ness made it perfectly clear that he and Madeleine, or he and any person, really, could and should not be together. He uses her throughout the book and never takes any responsibility. It's either the meds' fault he couldn't get it up, or it's his parents' fault for passing on their complete disfunction. But he never takes a step back and realizes that while being Bi-Polar wholly and truly sucks, it is not a reason to treat the person who loves you enough to almost wipe your ass for you like shit. Once it became abundantly clear that Leonard was not going to change his ways, and that Madeleine would never actually leave him, I began looking forward to Mitchell's sections.

I'm not going to give too much more of the plot, I'm just going to say that Mitchell and Madeleine do end up being together, but the book doesn't end with them together. No one is really happy at the end, except possibly Madeleine. She is living in New York, going to grad school at Columbia and finally on her own. And that's it, that's the whole end to the book.

I really enjoyed reading this book but Eugenides's style is one that is so subdued that it can sometimes be very hard to pay attention. His characters make the book. They are all so real that the book could have easily been a biography. That's what Eugenides does best, put real characters into real situations and make it interesting. He focuses on real life and sometimes that's enough.

The prose is beautiful, but the story didn't grab me. It's probably something that I would have like much more if I read it 10 years ago.

The Marriage Plot shall be a novel of comparisons. The most frequent comparison to be made is with Middlesex, Eugenides' last novel published nearly a decade ago. It's an unfair comparison–Middlesex was epic in many regards, and had Eugenides attempted to recreate his Pulitzer-winning novel he would've failed. The Marriage Plot is meant to stand on its own and it does so admirably.

There shall also be comparisons of fictional characters with those who lived. Does Mitchell share a likeness with Eugenides? Is Leonard based on David Foster Wallace? There certainly are many similarities. Does this mean these two authors chased after the same girl? Possibly, but I don't think it matters. Whether The Marriage Plot is based on factual events or simply borrows a few facts to create this fictional world shouldn't matter. It's a good story. Theorizing can be fun, but it shouldn't hinder the story.

Lastly, I think comparisons can be made between The Marriage Plot and Franzen's [b:Freedom|7905092|Freedom|Jonathan Franzen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1316729686s/7905092.jpg|9585796]. Despite their many differences (Freedom: decades, Marriage...: one year; Freedom: Suburban America, Marriage...: College with stops in Europe and Asia; etc.), there is a similar plot and atmosphere at work here. It's hard to shake at first. The big difference, however, is that The Marriage Plot is ten times as believable. While Freedom was closer in subject to the average American reader, it was peopled with characters placed in situations that were difficult to identify with. The Marriage Plot was peopled with people, and whether I liked them or not I could still see them as real.

Which brings us around to the divisive issue with The Marriage Plot: Characters. Unlike Middlesex, which was very plot-centered, The Marriage Plot is almost solely character driven. If you like the three main characters—everyone else in the novel is very forgettable—you'll likely enjoy the novel. Without that connection, however, there is little else to hold onto—the plot is simple and the language fairly minimalistic. If you're a hundred pages into this novel and you hate these characters, nothing will change your mind over the next 300 pages. That's not to say that these characters are not hateable—that's part of their allure—but a reader who isn't routing for one character or another is going to find this read incredibly boring. (Note: At times I was on Team Mitchell; other times I was on Team Leonard. Both were horrible choices for Madeleine, but Eugenides pulled me into these characters so effectively that I couldn't help but get sucked into their little drama.)

Add Eugenides' slightly meta fictional twist to the concept of the marriage plot and you've got a winner. No, it's not quite Middlesex, but really, did we want it to be?

Without a really good grasp of Derrida, Barthes and deconstruction, much of the beginning of this book will feel more like a philosophy text than a novel, but it's worth it. What this novel really is is a deconstruction of the Victorian Marriage plot. It twists the ideas of that stilted and outdated formulaic plot and turns it on its head. The characters are reflections of people; they are not the real thing. Each of them is a deconstructed trope from the Marriage Plot. The ‘bad choice' becomes the mentally ill man. The ‘good choice', usually a strong, moral man, becomes a seeker (with a moral failing). The woman they both desire is a woman who studies the Marriage Plot, but fails to see it right in front of her face. All in all, it is an incredibly fun read.