The Marriage Plot

Having read and enjoyed Jeffrey Eugenides first two novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, I was looking forward to his latest, The Marriage Plot, and it starts strongly, right in an area that clicks for me--college students, circa 1982. The story focuses on three graduating seniors from Brown and the love triangle they form, and how they seek to find their way after graduation.

The woman in the apex of the triangle is the beautiful Madeline Hanna. She adores Victorian novels, and in particular those that hinge on the marriage plot: "In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sangs of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely."

Of course Eugenides will craft something of his own marriage plot, which becomes undone. Manna is in love with Leonard Bankhead, a moody scientist, and after graduation they will live on Cape Cod while he has a research fellowship, studying the reproduction of yeast. But Leonard has depression, and Madeline suborns herself to become his caretaker.

Meanwhile, Mitchell Grammaticus, a religious studies major from Michigan, is in love with Hanna. He had his chance, when visiting her parents house during Thanksgiving break, but didn't make his move. The two then went on to have an on-again off-again platonic relationship, though Mitchell never lost hope that he would one day marry Madeline. "Madeline thought to herself, as she'd thought many times before, that Mitchell was the kind of smart, sane, parent-pleasing boy she should fall in love with and marry. That she would never fall in love with Mitchell and marry him, precisely because of this eligibility, was yet another indication, in a morning teeming with them, of just how screwed up she was in matters of the heart."

Mitchell, after graduation, goes with his friend Larry to Europe, and then on to India. Mitchell struggles to find his spiritual identity, and while volunteering for Mother Teresa, discovers that he can't quite hack it. He entertains thoughts of going to divinity school, but is devastated when he receives a letter from Madeline.

The Marriage Plot has some of the elements of the unrequited romantic yearning of a college student, but written through the many years of filtration that come afterward. I think most men can feel for Mitchell, as many of us have been in that situation, realizing we are perfect for a girl, but she doesn't love us anyway. Eugenides gets the college experience down perfectly, from the unspoken rules of mating: "In the sexual hierarchy of college, freshman males ranked at the very bottom," to the empty feeling on graduation day: "The problem was that Madeline, for the first time in her life, wanted no part of it. She wasn't proud of herself. She was in no mood to celebrate. She'd lost faith in the significance of the day and what the day represented."

The trouble with the book is that as it goes along, it bogs down on certain aspects that I didn't find all that interesting, especially Leonard's mental state. He becomes to the novel what he is to Madeline--an anchor. We get a lot of talk about his medication and his manic behavior while trying to self-reduce them. The stuff is well-written, particularly a scene in which he scares a teenager in a taffy shop, but it also seemed familiar. I really don't yearn to read more books about the clinically depressed.

Mitchell's time in Europe and India are more interesting, but things also get bogged down there, too, as you just want to slap him. I did find some insights interesting, such as: "The worst thing about religion was religious people," and his attitude about hippies: "Mitchell had always thought he'd been born too late to be a hippie. But he was wrong. Here it was 1983, and India was full of them. As far as Mitchell was concerned, the sixties were an Anglo-American phenomenon. It didn't seem right that continental Europeans, who had produced no decent rock music of their own, should be allowed to fall under its sway, to frug, to form communes, to sing Pink Floyd lyrics in heavily accented voices. That the Swedes and Germans he met in India were still wearing love beads in the eighties only confirmed Mitchell's prejudice that their participation in the sixties had been imitative at best."

I recommend The Marriage Plot, but with reservations. The writing is crisp and lovely and often heartbreaking, but the characters may not be people you want to hang out with. If I was this way after college, I apologize to all who knew me.