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The Marriage Plot / Jeffrey Eugenides

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It was rather fascinating being a fly on the wall for a short time in the lives of the interesting (but not so remarkable) characters in Jeffrey Eugenides's latest novel, The Marriage Plot. Time-travel back to the 1980s where co-ed Madeleine is finishing up her bachelor's degree at Brown and trying to sift through the debris of her less than successful college romances. She seems to want to remain true to Leonard, but his ups and downs as a manic-depressive throw a monkey wrench into her vision of a stable life. Mitchell has had a crush on Maddy since high school, but his love remains unrequited as he continues to pine for her even after his quest for spirituality takes him to faraway India.

In addition to Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell, we get to know Maddy's stalwart and nurturing (but ever so slightly interfering) parents, her flighty sister, Leonard's whacked-out family, as well as a slate of other memorable characters. Eugenides seems to be doing a Jonathan Franzen with The Marriage Plot, portraying slightly dysfunctional, but still functioning individuals who find themselves in not-so-extraordinary dilemmas that everyone can identify with.

I really enjoyed this novel, though nothing really happens. Everything seems somehow familiar, the characters make choices you yourself might consider making, and these choices frequently lead to unexpected outcomes. I guess that's what life is like mostly.

Here are a couple passages I marked (there were more, but I'll spare you)


On English majors:
Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren't left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical; because they weren't musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what theyd done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in.  p22+

On the home libraries of ex-English majors:
To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly There was, in short, this mid-size but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test... p6+ 

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