The Well of Cromulence.

I Finally Read The Marriage Plot and Was Confused

romanceclub:

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides

I actually finally read it, can you believe it?

This is a book that is a bit difficult to approach, for two reasons:

1. There was a huge critical response when it was first published, which is what happens after a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author publishes his first book in ten years. A lot of people loved it, a lot of people hated it, and The Hairpin did a particularly effective takedown here.

2. The Marriage Plot is a lot like the books I normally review, but also not like them at all. Does that make sense? No? I’ll try to explain later. 

So the basic premise is that Jeffrey Eugenides, sitting on his pile of money and literary prizes, decided that the next book he was going to write would be a spin on the classic marriage plots of Eliot, Austin, etc. But better than that, it would be a metacriticism of classic marriage plots, because the girl in question is an English Lit student who wrote her honors thesis on the 18th century marriage plot. BUT SHE IS IN HER OWN MARRIAGE PLOT AT THE SAME TIME. And since Jeffrey Eugenides is very, very smart and also has his own army of researchers, there would be a lot of obscure references to philosophy, literary tropes, religious texts, semantics, and yeast biology.

Then the publisher was like, “Holy shit, you’re writing another book? Whatever you want, man. We’ll publish it. You can totally include long, almost unreadable passages from semantics texts, because who are we kidding, you could draw a picture of a pony on a legal pad and it would make the NYT best seller list.”

And then a book like The Marriage Plot happens. It’s about Madeleine Hanna, a recent graduate of Brown University. She’s on point of a love triangle. The other two points are her brilliant scientist boyfriend, Leonard, who suffers from bipolar disorder; and Mitchell, her friend, a burgeoning theologian who is in love with her.

The book follows the year after graduation for these three, in which Mitchell goes on a religious journey of self-discovery through Europe and India, and Leonard goes to Cape Cod to be a research fellow at Pilgrim Lake. Madeleine follows Leonard and … does basically nothing for the rest of the book.

The character of Madeleine was kind of a mindfuck for me. On the one hand, I was at one time a 22-year-old naive English Lit major and there were a lot of moments where I felt like Madeleine was doing exactly what I would have said or done in a given situation. I empathized with her, yo.

On the other hand, the entire book is her reacting to one thing or another with very little self-directed action on her part and it pissed me off that Jeffrey Eugenides wrote a character that was dead-on while also kind of hating her. The Hairpin article I mentioned above likens The Marriage Plot to Twilight, and I’m not sure that’s fair - just about every love triangle story has a girl deciding between two dudes who are opposites (one is more earthy, one is more scholarly and/or worldly), and Twilight is basically that literary trope at its most reductive and I don’t think it’s totally fair to compare every single love triangle book to Twilight because LITERARY LOVE TRIANGLES EXISTED FOR CENTURIES BEFORE THAT SHITTY BOOK CAME OUT HAVEN’T YOU GUYS HEARD OF ROOM WITH A VIEW? Ahem. Excuse me. Tangent.

Let’s try that again. The Marriage Plot is not Twilight, but yeah, Madeleine reeks of Bella Swan. A smarter and more interesting Bella Swan, but, let’s get real, you could cast a piece of toast as the romantic lead in Breaking Dawn, Part 3: Revege of Renesmee and it would be smarter and more interesting than Bella Swan.

Both dudes are waaaaaaaaaay better characters than Madeleine, and I found Mitchell’s travel and religious awakening to be fascinating. At one point, there’s a section from Leondard’s perspective as he goes through the manic and depressive phases of his illness, and it’s riveting.

At the end of the day, I think I enjoyed this book in part because Eugenides is a fantastic writer, and all those literary allusions made me feel smart. This book had a bit more weight than anything I’d read in a while, and it felt good to dive into something longer and a bit more complex.

That said, I am going to basically refute that last paragraph and say that this is a book that is essentially about rich white kids and their rich white kid problems. War and Peace it ain’t. I know that’s pretty … rich coming from me, given the the entire genre of historical romance is about rich white people and rich white people problems, but this man won a Pulitzer and I am going to hold him to a higher standard.

For those of you just here for the sex, there is sex and it is graphic, but not really sexy. There is some sex that is like, aggressively unsexy.

So, uh, I don’t know. I really enjoyed reading this book. But I didn’t think it was a great book, and I’m not sure I can recommend it. If you’re looking for academic romance that revisits old tropes set in the recent past, go check out The Cookbook Collector.