The Marriage Plot involves what may strike some readers as a rather ordinary love triangle between three freshly minted Brown University graduates striving to find their footing in the world...But rest assured: There's a sly meta-fictional level to this apparently conventional coming-of-age novel about the romantic and occupational dilemmas of three recent Ivy League graduates … The Marriage Plot benefits from totally convincing descriptions of living with manic-depression, as well as a fluency with — and gently derisive attitude toward — the abstruse Derrida and Barthes texts that Madeleine and Leonard wade through in the semiotics seminar in which they meet.
This is a story about romance and novels — and the bright young people who read them. Or misread them … Eugenides’s love affair with fiction embraces all those contradictions: the novel’s potential to confuse and enlighten, to teach what love is really like even while confusing us with impossible ideals … The novel’s first section, a 127-page masterpiece that takes place on graduation day, twists and soars through one witty, erudite, perfectly choreographed sentence after another...These later sections are not as compelling, although the portrayal of life with a manic-depressive is distressing enough to shred anyone’s 19th-century illusions of romance. Eugenides is frighteningly perceptive about the challenges of mental illness.
It would be easy to recommend The Marriage Plot as a pleasurable but shallow book—a well-produced, HD nostalgia trip … By giving us a graspable DFW character, Eugenides saves his book and trumpets the merits of his realistic style. Of course there's no real answer to why DFW committed suicide … Count me as someone who was taken in by The Marriage Plot. I enjoyed spending time with these familiar people, with their familiar cultural references, and discovering some dark unfamiliarity, too. In the best possible way, it's like reading a long, detailed, acutely observed Alumni Notes in the back of some Ivy college monthly.
The Marriage Plot is yet a new departure — daylight realism, like Middlesex, but far more intimate in tone and scale … The novel isn’t really concerned with matrimony or the stories we tell about it, and the title, the opening glance at Madeleine’s library and the intermittent talk of books come across as attempts to impose an exogenous meaning. The novel isn’t really about love either, except secondarily. It’s about what Eugenides’s books are always about, no matter how they differ: the drama of coming of age … The story is wry, engaging and beautifully constructed. And yet it finally sells its characters short.
No one’s more adept at channeling teenage angst than Jeffrey Eugenides. Not even J. D. Salinger … Mr. Eugenides’s own moving but long-winded book turns out to be a sort of modern-day variation on those old-fashioned narratives, meant, it would seem, to demonstrate that sexual equality and divorce haven’t killed the novel, as one of Madeleine’s pompous professors contends … [The Marriage Plot] turns out to be a lot less dramatic and a lot less daring than the author’s earlier novels.
One of Mr. Eugenides's many subtle tricks in The Marriage Plot is to make these three characters embody the ideas that disable them … It is in developing a story that The Marriage Plot encounters problems, because when Mr. Eugenides leaves behind collegiate jeu d'esprit and advances to more adult subjects like illness, marriage and religious faith he is far less assured … The glibness of the storytelling in The Marriage Plot seems gimmicky—in a book assailing literary gimmickry. The novel's worst contrivance is that it doesn't just obliquely call to mind David Foster Wallace; it practically brings him onstage in the character of Leonard.
This is the task the book sets itself: to see if a viable ‘marriage plot’ might be constructed around a feminist-era heroine for whom marriage no longers means an irrevocable surrender of person and property … There's a fair amount of irony at the expense of undergraduate pretension and holier-than-thou posturing, and some of it spills over to the three protagonists. But at the same time the book wants you to take their yearnings and dilemmas seriously, and the result is a curious tonal indecisiveness … The other missing piece, more important perhaps, is the kind of action that gives dramatic reality to the complexities of a character's inner life.
The love triangle is a throwback to Austen, and Eugenides seems to be casting his lot with the classic novel … Eugenides lauds and exploits the pleasures of traditionalism while sneaking in a little postmodernism on the side … If there is a writer to whom Eugenides appears connected, it is not Wallace but Jonathan Franzen...Eugenides benefits by the comparison [to Freedom]: This book is sweeter, kinder, with a more generous heart. What's more, it is layered with exactly the kinds of things that people who love novels will love.
The Marriage Plot frequently subverts expectations...creating suspense that it then dissolves in a single line. It’s as if Eugenides wants to steer readers away from Madeleine’s choices, and prioritize the lives of those involved in that choice, and the way those lives may be changed by being joined … Madeleine remains at the center of the novel, and not just as a prize to be won. She begins the novel driven by love to swoon and pout. She ends it wise with experience, having learned that, constructed or not, we live under the burden of love and must decide how, or whether, to carry its weight.
In capturing the heady spirit of youthful intellect on the verge, Eugenides revives the coming-of-age novel for a new generation The book's fidelity to its young heroes and to a superb supporting cast of enigmatic professors, feminist theorists, neo-Victorians, and concerned mothers, and all of their evolving investment in ideas and ideals is such that the central argument of the book is also its solution: the old stories may be best after all, but there are always new ways to complicate them.
Eugenides' fluid prose is capable of summoning up worlds as disparate as Calcutta streets, biology labs, dysfunctional families, hospital mental wards or undergraduate parties. He paints striking contrasting portraits of a fiercely rigorous religion scholar and an English professor whose slack-jawed infatuation with semiotics is likened to a midlife adulterous fling … The Marriage Plot dramatizes the baffling, often contradictory feelings endemic to the leap into adulthood's great unknown … For all its strengths, however, this leisurely told novel doesn't entirely satisfy. Eugenides' description of Leonard - ‘large and shaggy, like a Sendak creature’ - could well apply to the book itself.
