The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

The new novel from the bestselling author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides.

Brown University, 1982. Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English student and incurable romantic, is writing her thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot – authors of the great marriage plots. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different men, intervenes.

Leonard Bankhead, brilliant scientist and charismatic loner, attracts Madeleine with an intensity that she seems powerless to resist. Meanwhile her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus, a theology student searching for some kind of truth in life, is certain of at least one thing – that he and Madeleine are destined to be together.

But as all three leave college, they will have to figure out how they want their own marriage plot to end.

• ISBN13: 9780007441303
• Publish Date: 12 April 2012 (first published 3 October 2011)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Imprint: Fourth Estate Ltd
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 416
• Language: English
• URL: http://harpercollins.co.uk

Reviews

[clementine]

Self-indulgent and pretentious. The characters are a) a bland female sex fantasy, b) a shallowly religious loser who is predictably and irritatingly obsessed with the woman, and c) the woman's manic-depressive, misogynistic, and emotionally abusive boyfriend. Throw in some references to semiotic theory and second-wave feminism (all which is explored on a purely theoretical basis) and you've got yourself a really tedious novel. A lot of the prose is quite enjoyable, but the essential story is irritating. The character of Madeleine was blatantly written by a man. Less enjoyable the further in I got.