The Marriage Plot
Books | Fiction / Family Life / Marriage & Divorce
3.4
(426)
Jeffrey Eugenides
The long-awaited new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides."There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel." —Anthony Trollope, Barchester TowersMadeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn't get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot: purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn't lived up to expectations.But now, in the spring of her senior year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course "to see what all the fuss is about," and, for reasons that have nothing to do with school, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morten - charismatic loner, college Darwinist and lost Oregon boy - who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus - devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton - resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.The triangle in this amazing and delicious novel about a generation beginning to grow up is age old, and completely fresh and surprising. With devastating wit, irony and an abiding understanding and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides resuscitates the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
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More Details:
Author
Jeffrey Eugenides
Pages
432
Publisher
Knopf Canada
Published Date
2011-10-11
ISBN
030740188X 9780307401885
Ratings
Google: 5
Community ReviewsSee all
"Truly as wonderful as the reviews and its reputation suggest. 3 highly intelligent, yet flawed Brown University grads cope with their expectations for life and love, while coming to grip with their own shortcomings. A beautiful novel.<br/>"
Lesley Williams
"One of those books that you invest a lot of time in so you think they must be good and then you get to the end and think, "Dang, did I really just read that?" I mean, the writing style and characters must have had something going for them to make me want to continue reading. However, this really isn't a very interesting book. It's about three self-absorbed rich kids from Brown that don't really have any problems but think that they do. As an English major myself, at the start the depiction of English majors/professors/class discussions did amuse me, but only briefly. The love triangle between these three hipsters overly intellectual characters is not interesting. And multiple times I thought as I watched them make stupid childish decisions and fall back on their parents' money or taking time off to apply to graduate school or travel all over the world for months, geez, it would be nice to live that way and not have any real consequences or responsibilities. Even when things don't work out for our heroine, she still gets into graduate school in the Ivy League. There is really only one interesting character, Mitchell, and he is still pretty freaking annoying, madly in love with the girl without telling us why except she's pretty. Halfway through I thought, none of these people should be together. Maybe that's the point of the book? To shed light on how idiotic "the marriage plot" is?"
R T
Rebekah Travis
"I was really looking forward to reading this and there were parts of it that I really enjoyed, but by the end, I just wanted it to be over."
L
Lauren
"I am still reading it, but it is a fantastic book! I can't wait to finish it."
J R
John R. Allen
"Complex and understandable while still touching and simple. "
Rachel Dows
"This will be short. <br/><br/>Although the writing style of Eugenides is very easy to get caught up in, I did not like this book. The majority of the book was complete background story, and everything seemed to move dreadfully slow because of it. I understand what Eugenides was going for, but it just was not my kind of book. In fact, I had to use an audiobook on a long drive to a conference I went to just so I had the satisfaction of finishing it (I kept putting that off).<br/><br/>In short:<br/><br/>Slow. Long. I definelty get the background (because it was all background...)."
Jess
"The best of his books. Eugenides has improved his voice and eliminated any drags in the story. All good, all interesting, all the time."
Andrew Greene
"Spoiler: disappointed in the ending. Sad that there wasn't a jubilant ending, waited the whole time for a faster pace, some action to move the story along, but never got it. Gave the book four stars, however, because I felt that the characters were amazingly developed and the author at least painted a positive light on Christianity."
Angie Boutch
