The Marriage Plot: A Novel Kindle Edition

From the beginning of time, everyone loves a good story--something worthy of our time--filled with action, betrayal, coincidence and most of all love. Even though we know from the very start that part of the reward reaped by the hero for saving the world is the undying love of his main squeeze, if it is done well, we like to go through the motions--sigh and gasp at every twist and turn of the road leading towards the inevitable marital bliss. We simper over period pieces, impressed by manners and protocol of a day-gone-by that disguises the sometimes very brutal battle of the sexes. We love the escape and the whimsical idea that "all ends well in love." But does it? Or is it just all a layer of optimism--some kind of Cupid's opium supplied to the masses that mask the pain of reality? Those impressed by the wit and "art" of battling-sexes repartee avoid the existence of the bleak Neverland eluded to by Cormac McCarthy's character as adapted by the Coen brother's in their film " No Country for Old Men " where the knowledge of too much information a la the 21st century breeds violence and apathy that supplants optimism and contaminates the ability for happiness or perhaps defines more clearly the delusion. Those of us ensconced in a nebulous unhappiness applaud the nuanced dream--we want to believe in the turn of phrase that belies the primitive act of cave man hauling cave girl into his lair that defines the happily-ever-after fairytale for each era. But, what happens when the good old-fashioned love story is tainted by Post-Modern angst? When there is no Pemberton for Mr. and Mrs. Darcy to ride to after their love's laborious walk down the aisle? Or, jobs to go to after four plus years of Ivy League idealism and $100,000.00 tuitions? Does happy-ever-after exist for the WTF Generation? Author and Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides ( Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) ), slyly comments on all this in his latest novel, "The Marriage Plot" with a scintillating and scathing look at just where romance and the happy ending fit into a TMI world.Does he succeed? Or is he just as "lost" as the rest of us? If his purpose is to present a social commentary on modern world with problems evolving from too much, yet too little--where the fairy tales have been exposed as unrealistic pabulum and clever minds not only see through the façade, they wallow within thought labyrinths so dense they get lost in semiotics--well, then, yes, he has indeed crafted a well written depiction of the current state of many minds.However, whether or not "The Marriage Plot" flows with page-turning power depends on which section of the story the reader is caught up in. Eugenides portrayal of college life in all its very serious idealism most decidedly is brilliant. His ability to depict the delectable Madeleine Hanna in all her confused roles as incurable romantic, savvy-somewhat-liberated woman, willing sexual pioneer and needy nurturer drives the story through the murkier waters of her two suitors' attempt at finding themselves in a world that promises much but rewards with little. A reading escapist, Madeleine feels almost ashamed of her love of Jane Austen and her simple love/financial merger (when compared to today's dilemmas) themes pitting men against women in a game that eventually leads to marriage especially when her intellectual peers wax fanatically on the deconstruction philosophies of Derrida, Barthes and Baudrillard. Even though she realizes that her expectations for love and marriage are based on what she has read in her favorite novels, she cannot help but be defined by this fictional idealism of love. In a sense, she is immune to reality. The all-encompassing goal of finding "the one" supersedes identity and career development and eventually places Madeleine in a situation not unknown to other women of the 21st century with a similar penchant for romantic literature that end up keeping psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies in big business. Eugenides points all this out with a delicious accuracy.Madeleine's two potential mates, Leonard and Mitchell, are representative of more 21st century angst as they embody the brilliant scientist somewhat ready for a brave new world and the spiritual do-gooder--aware of the planet's inequalities and pained by the enormity of being in it but not of it.Eugenides snidely makes his point as the back end of the novel gathers momentum and the reader hashes through Mitchell's Indian pilgrimage, fueled by his insistence that Madeleine is the only woman in the world for him while Leonard tumbles into a black hole of depression that even with drugs he barely avoids.As brilliant as it all is, however, "The Marriage Plot" just isn't that much fun to read. Somehow the explanation that we as readers are so contaminated by the books we so voraciously devour, so much so that we are unfit or invariably disappointed by real life is irresolutely true, yet it does not make for a satisfying read. The fact that we read because it isn't reality--that it has a beginning, a middle and an end and punctuated with key attributes that make it fascinating in a way that real life isn't allows us the escape, the sense of closing a parenthesis that unless you really have your ducks in order and have an idea of the date of your eventual demise, you will never bring to a successful or totally fulfilling conclusion. "The Marriage Plot" is almost too real to fully enjoy.Be that as it may, it is a work of genius. Eugenides tells a complicated story of preconditioning and its dangers when it comes to individual goals and shifting satisfactions. Whether we are lost in a delusion of what we are supposed to have--be that with regard to the romantic, the spiritual or the intellectual--we move to the beat of what drives us at the moment--our reasoning is what we think it to be. Whether we move in the direction of what we need or are held back by preconception is ultimately up to us.I listened to the unabridged audio CD of this novel. Reader David Pittu does a fine job of engaging the reader with his ability to change his voice to define the major three characters.Bottom Line? In "The Marriage Plot," author Jeffrey Eugenides has written a telling novel of modern times that speaks loudly on preconditioning themes and definitions that we all use to steer us towards a picture book idea of happiness. His portrait of three 1982 college graduates engages on a surface level and then eventually kicks into a higher gear that becomes both social and philosophical commentary. Whether or not it fully entertains as a novel depends on how much conversation it generates. Recommended as a " Lost: The Complete Collection " for those who love literary analysis.Diana Faillace Von Behren"reneofc"

The Marriage Plot seems like a fairly "normal" story for Eugenides compared to Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. Unlike Middlesex's huge scope of years and locations, Marriage Plot focuses on a few years in the lives of Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell as they graduate college and begin to discover who they are.Eugenides seems to recognize what a pivotal time in life those first few years after college are. The decisions we make about relationships, careers, whether to go to graduate school, or whether to just roam for a while, all have lasting implications. The average twenty-one or twenty-two year old coming out of college might be self-centered and immature but these are still decisions that will affect their lives for years. Can they be undone later? Sure. But not without consequences. Eugenides shows us, compellingly, how little we know about ourselves at this time in our lives, and how much we have to think about.The novel begins on graduation day. Madeleine Hanna wakes up to her doorbell ringing, her parents outside. She's hung over, wearing a stained, borrowed dress from the night before, and feels like her life is falling apart because she broke up with her boyfriend, Leonard, and has no idea where she's going to live or whether she got into a graduate program. Her parents know none of this of course. Madeleine has a contentious relationship with her friend Mitchell, who is in love with her but who feels she's treated him badly. Mitchell is off to spend the year after graduation traveling through Europe and India with a friend. He's lined up a sort-of research job with a professor but otherwise has no specific timeline or plans for the future.Leonard is someone we'll get to know later in the book, so for now all we know is that his relationship with Madeleine has ended and she's devastated. Eugenides will later fill in all the details of how these three characters got to know each other, and what they come to mean to each other. He shows us the same events, during college and after graduation, from each character's perspective.The characters are very real, and very sympathetic, even though they're far from perfect. Madeleine is beautiful, privileged, and comes from a happy supportive family. She's the "normal" girl, the one you probably envied in school. I know I did. She's smart, but not off-puttingly smart, and she's got all the advantages. But at the same time, her life is a mess. Mitchell is the smart guy - you know he'll do okay whatever he decides to do, but he's also the kid that got picked on, who doesn't have the confidence to go after the pretty girl. He's the quintessential "nice guy", the friend. Leonard is the guy you fall for in college - he's brainy but also an independent thinker. He's kind of a rebel. He's good-looking and confident. If Mitchell is the guy who cares too much what women think of him, Leonard is the guy who doesn't care at all. And of course that means he gets the girl.If you think these characters sound superficial, you'd be wrong. Eugenides develops each one fully. By showing us each of their perspectives, we see how little the three characters understand each other. Each of them is trying to get by, the best they can.As a former English major, I enjoyed Eugenides' attention to literature and how that influences these characters. His descriptions of books can be overwhelming at times, but when you're a college student, or a post-grad, what you study and how you study are important. The characters judge each other constantly by what they read and how they talk about what they read. This book is almost an homage to different kinds of literature. The title, for example, refers to a class Madeleine takes on Victorian literature and "the marriage plot", a subject that later becomes her thesis. The marriage plot refers to works by authors such as Jane Austen, and the importance marriage plays in Victorian life. The topic is contrasted with later works of literature, such as Middlemarch, and the reality of modern-day marriage. Madeleine's instructor notes that the marriage plot as a story device would be almost irrelevant today, because people can divorce and remarry so easily.I think everyone will read this book a little differently depending on their age. For me it brought to mind the decisions that could have been made when I graduated college, and that pivotal, exciting but so-very-sad graduation day. That was a day I knew a lot of happy times were ending. I had everything going for me -but still it felt like the one time in my life that was relatively care-free was ending.Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard may seem like they have it easy. They don't. There are no right or wrong decisions, there's just the path you go down and the one you don't. But we don't get to go back and do that time in our lives over.For more reviews visit The Book Stop at [...].

Some well-drawn characters, but a book with the title 'The Marriage Plot' needs more of a plot.There is a remarkable portrayal of bipolarity and the caricature of a Quaker meeting is sharp, although a bit more 2010 than 1982; there were still a lot of the old-money, came-over-with Billy Penn sort around in 1982.Eugenides probably thought the ending clever, but it was empty. A whimper, not a bang. I raced through the last quarter of the book to see who got the girl, and then, whoosh! Nothing. And disorderly, with so many loose ends. Mitchell was the most interesting character, smarter than Madelaine and more grounded than Leonard, so why abandon him in such a way?The evocation of Brown was strong, but at times anachronistic. I don't remember smoothies in 1982, or jerk chicken, or concern about 'gender'. He should have watched Mystic Pizza again.

I had heard of Jeffrey Eugenides book "MIddlesex' but never read it so I had no idea what to expect from this writer. I was led to this book from a review of another book which referenced it and was pleasantly surprised. This is a piece of literary fiction, the detail is in the fine writing more than in actual plot though there is a beginning, a middle, an arc and then an end. It is a long book and the print is reasonably small so it took over a week to read but each day I looked forward to picking the novel up and reading more.The story is simple. One young woman about to complete university, two young men also about to complete university. Both men have had a relationship with the woman and she is fated to marry one of them. The question is which one? That is the story. It is the story of their relationships during university and the year after they finish.That's it. The fine writing makes it an interesting book.

The title of this, the third novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides, refers to the entanglements of three students and the plotting of Victorian romance novels. ‘The Marriage Plot ‘tells of the romantic, sexual, philosophical, religious and literary coming togethers/going aparts of a literature student Madeleine Hanna, scientist Leonard Bankhead and theology student Mitchell Grammaticus at Brown University in 1982 America. It is a tale of youthful assumptions, experimentations, dreams and disappointments. Perhaps it is a tale which will strike a chord with people of the same age as Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell, rather than those who are older.None of the three main characters are particularly likeable and at times the book gets bogged down in literary theory, philosophy, science and religious theory. Leonard is brilliant but a manic depressive, something which colours the entire book. The portrayal of his illness is convincing and shows the knife edge of pharmaceutical dosage needed to maintain a healthy mental balance. Leonard yo-yo’s back and forth, coping and not coping, at times allowing his manic tendencies to win. Madeleine accuses him of liking being depressed all the time. Mitchell is the idealistic one who goes to India to work for Mother Theresa’s Calcutta hospice and confronts some unpalatable truths. In comparison, Madeleine seems rather spoiled. Both men dote on her however and this is the spine which holds the story together: who will Madeleine finally choose?Eugenides describes mundane things so beautifully. “Outside, the temperature, which had remained cold through March, had shot up into the fifties. The resulting thaw was alarming in its suddenness, drainpipes and gutters dripping, sidewalks pudding, streets flooded, a constant sound of water rushing downhill.” Simple writing at its best. But at other times the writing feels manic and not just in Leonard’s sections. There is an authorial indulgence with many clever asides from the plot and characters. I soon learned to read these parts slightly out-of-focus, not worrying for example that I didn’t grasp Leonard’s sections on yeast or Mitchell’s constant references to ‘Something Beautiful for God’, Malcolm Muggeridge’s book about Mother Theresa. The last third of the book passed much quicker than the first two.‘The Marriage Plot’ is ambitious, as ‘Middlesex’ was, and rightly so, but is perhaps the inevitable ‘difficult’ book after such a huge success. This will not deter me from reading Eugenides again.

This starts out well - it's funny (all the Derrida and Barthes student and lecturer thing) if never believable (such as how many things can a hangover girl do before 9am on graduation day!). But then it degenerates. Very badly I really got bored with all the bipolar stuff. Then all the religious stuff (filling how many pages with a repetitious prayer?) and then did I really want all those details of dying people in India at Mother Teresa's place? I started to skim read it.It lost the plot after the first quarter or so of the book. There was too much of Eugenides doing his autobiography (India, Detroit etc).He's also careless. The Globe Theatre in London was opened in 1997 so how did one of his characters visit it more than 15 years previously?I have some of his other novels. Now I don't know whether to bother or give them to a charity shop!

A story of a group of undergraduates and their struggles as they approach graduation and then move on. The cast of characters does not lift the spirits - some seemed doomed from the start as a result of the incompetence of their baby boomer parents, others just don't get their act together in the knowledge that they will be bailed out by theirs. An episodic piece, I had to have regular, short stabs at the book, which suited me at the time.