The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (A Review by Joseph Michael Owens)

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

416 pgs, $15

“In Professor Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. 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 sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely.”

Indeed, 2011 has been ther I’ve finally gotten to know Jeffrey Eugenides—or at least his work. For no particular reason, I’d been putting off reading Middlesex, which my wife (fiancée—no, girlfriend—at the time bought for me). That was in 2007, I believe. Since then, it had simply been sitting on my shelf, nestled between Lolita and Naked Lunch (spine aesthetics has Eugenides flanked by Nabokov and Burroughs), gathering some dust, yes, but also an enormous amount of praise by readers whose opinions I hold in high regard.

I finally cracked the book open near the end of September and finished it about a week later. The only reason I note this is because, despite reading a decent number of novels every year, I read them relatively slowly. The other reason I wanted to read Middlesex as quickly as possible is because of the good things I was hearing about Eugenides’s newest novel, The Marriage Plot.

People tend to handle hype differently. Over the years, I’ve honed a set of internal defense mechanisms to help neutralize hype (positive or negative) for various types of media—books, movies, music, videogames, etc. I also try to consume said hyped media as quickly as possible near its release date to form my impressions before the peanut gallery really starts chipping in their two cents.

In any event, these techniques usually work. I was able to enjoy Johnathan Franzen’s Freedom last year before it became popular—and trendy—to hate. I’m able to enjoy big budget Hollywood movies and Call of Duty games for what they are. My favorite book of all time is Infinite Jest, which has been fortunate enough to experience an extra round of “trendy hate” since DFW’s death in 2008. (Though I submit there are certainly a significant number of readers who genuinely dislike Wallace’s style; I’m not counting them here.) More than the glowing prerelease impressions, it was the story behind The Marriage Plot that really intrigued me.

“Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.”

Set at Brown University in the 1980s, the book centers on Madeleine Hanna, a lovely but incurable romantic and senior English major, trying to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia [she] 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”. Competing for Madeleine’s affections are two male love interests: Leonard Bankhead, a brilliant, but temperamental Darwinian from the Pacific Northwest, and Mitchell Grammaticus, a Religious Studies major from Detroit. However, “real world” events force the trio to reevaluate everything they learned in college.

“Madeleine could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight… It wasn’t long before she’d become bored with the thesis. Doubts about the originality of her work nagged at her. She felt as if she was regurgitating the arguments Saunders had made in his marriage plot seminar.”

However, it’s not simply boredom with a college thesis that moves The Marriage Plot along. Eugenides delves into some seriously emotionally deep and psychologically dark territories in this book—bipolar manic depression, caring for loved ones with mental illness, divorce, safety and danger in relationships, attempted suicide, just to name a few.

This is probably a good time to mention some unofficial but incredibly intriguing tidbits about the book. Though pure speculation at this point, some readers hypothesize that is more roman à clef than novel. In a number of interviews, at least the few I’ve personally read, Eugenides insists the similarities are merely coincidental. However, you needn’t try to stretch your imagination to see the similarities between Leonard Bankhead and David Foster Wallace. Likewise, it isn’t all that hard to find similarities between Mitchell Grammaticus and Eugenides himself. The intrigue adds an extra layer to the novel. I found myself repeatedly wondering: which parts are true here?

Consider the facts: Eugenides moved to New York after graduating from Brown in 1983. That same summer, Jonathan Franzen was living in Jackson Heights, Queens. Franzen eventually connected with Eugenides, Rick Moody, and their other college friend Donald Antrim at a time when Franzen was already friends with Wallace, who also knew William T. Vollmann, Mary Karr and Mark Costello. In The Marriage Plot, Leonard wears a bandanna, chews tobacco, has expertise in philosophy and struggles with mental illness. Mitchell is a Greek-American from Detroit engaged in religious studies at Brown who takes a big trip abroad and ends up volunteering for Mother Teresa in India.

Leonard, like Wallace, is tortured and tragic. Reading about his illness is hard, especially for anyone who’s ever experienced mental illness first hand or cared for someone who was suffering. Eugenides truly nails the specifics and the fallout. It’s an incredibly visceral experience.

“Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up… ‘The drugs just slow the process down. But the end’s inevitable. The question is, how to turn this thing off?’ He jabbed at his head with his index finger. ‘It’s cutting me up, and I can’t turn it off. Madeleine, listen to me. Listen. I’m not going to get better.’ Oddly, saying this seemed to satisfy him, as though he was pleased to make the situation clear.”

I won’t give too much more away, nor will I speculate further. The bottom line is that this is a book I really liked and if I were creating a “Best of 2011” list, I wouldn’t hesitate to include The Marriage Plot.

Now that that’s done, I’m off to finish The Virgin Suicides!

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Joseph Michael Owens has written for various publications including Specter Magazine, The Rumpus, The Houston Literary Review and InDigest Magazine. His short collection, Shenanigans!will be released in 2012 by Grey Sparrow Press. Joe lives in Omaha with four dogs and one wife.