The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides

Fourth Estate

Otago Daily Times, November 26th 2011

According to one of the characters of Jeffrey Eugenides latest offering, “the novel reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance…marriage didn’t mean much any more, and neither did the novel”. The Marriage Plot seems to be the author’s attempt to disprove this hypothesis, and create a contemporary story in which love can maintain its significance in a world where commitment is ephemeral. A worthy project, perhaps, but one in which I’m not sure he succeeds.

The narrative centres on Madeline Hanna, an earnest young English major whose senior thesis examines culmination and demise of great English love story from ‘happy ever after’ of Austen to the wife-swapping of Updike (which Madeline considers the last vestige of the marriage plot). Solid enough scholarship, but this is the 1980’s and not only is realism unfashionable, the idea that novels are ‘about’ anything is actively derided.

Curious about this new phenomenon and embarrassed by her preference for Dickens, Eliot and James when everyone else is reading Derrida, Madeline enrols in Semiotics 211. It is here, “at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love”, that Madeline’s own romantic troubles begin in the form in her classmate, Leonard Bankshead. Unlike other students, who say things like “I’m finding it hard to introduce myself, actually, because the whole idea of social introductions is so problematized”, Leonard (a biology major) figures that “it [is] pretty handy to have a name, especially when you [are] being called to dinner”, and is the only other person in the course who seems to share Madeline’s discomfort with a world view in which nothing is meaningful.

They soon become involved in an intense relationship that, when it ends, plunges Leonard into the depths of bipolar depression. Drawn back by his neediness and the hope of regaining their original passion (for in his manic phase he is impossibly charismatic), Madeline returns to and eventually marries him. 

Because every good romance requires a third player, we also follow the fortunes of Michael Grammaticus, a religious studies student and old friend of Madeline’s who is convinced she is his soul mate despite her own repeated insistence that theirs is a platonic relationship. In an attempt to forget her he embarks on a spiritual pilgrimage through India, including 3 weeks working at one of Mother Theresa’s poor hospitals.  Returning as angst-ridden as ever, he again encounters Madeline and finds himself in the perfect position to demonstrate the nature of true love in a post-marriage-plot world.

I wish I could say I enjoyed this novel, and I do admire Eugenide’s attempt to wreak realist revenge upon the pretensions of post-modernism, but ultimately I didn’t like any of the characters enough to care. That it is autobiographical in spirit (a reviewer in the LRB identifies the protagonists as David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and the author himself) adds a certain voyeuristic frisson, but I was left feeling like The Marriage Plot fails in one crucial respect; is just isn’t an interesting story. 

https://www.odt.co.nz/entertainment/books/realist-revenge-wreaked-pretensions-post-modernism