The Marriage Plot [ペーパーバック]

One is led to expect it - a new novel by a much-hyped author following on a earlier success. For a number of reasons, I'm glad I read and finished this novel; at the same time however, I'm left dissatisfied and disappointed.

This novel seemed a pale shadow of his earlier work Middlesex - both in the writing and the plot. Young female protagonist gets saddled with an infirm fiance/husband and who then lives in a quandary - sounds a lot like Ann Packer's The Dive from Clausen's Pier. But that's where the resemblance ends. While Packer packed (!) an emotional punch with her deeply nuanced rendering of her protagonist's emotional life and in the process humanized her despite her evident flaws, Eugenides' rendering and characterization of HIS protagonist as well as the other characters by contrast revealed rather thin silhouettes.

It may be an effect of the novel's overall tone and voice; Eugenides assumes a chipper and distantly objective voice in dissecting his characters' inner voices and emotional turmoil, mental lives and activities. His cool, shrink-like/God-like stance however keeps us at a distance and thus from empathizing with their travails despite at times sympathetic portrayals; instead of being drawn into the felt hurts and rawness of their dilemmas, there was a constant underlying thrum reminding me of who they were in the times they lived in (early 1980s) i.e. privileged and self-absorbed college graduates without especially great financial concerns or obligations other than to themselves and what they felt entitled to. There was a diffuse sense of their sophomoric attitudes, jejune concerns and overall busy-ness in tending to themselves and nursing their mental images of each other, such that when reality intruded in a big way, they were all hugely unmatched. It was hard to feel like I actually cared very much what happened to these people one way or another, unlike the protagonist in Packer's novel (as irritating as she was in her own way).

I'd even go so far as to say that The Marriage Plot is a misnomer; Eugenides claimed in a radio interview that he was attempting to traffic in the tropes found in Victorian novels but as I see it, there was something flippant and even subtly snide and derisive in his treatment and approach to his characters playing at adulthood. The notion of marriage and its crucial implications on the economic and social status for women in the past certainly did not apply in the novel's setting; by contrast, what we have here is merely a mildly convoluted case of trite boy-girl relations heightened only by dint of the microscopic lens the author put them under. To that end, perhaps an alternative title to the novel might more aptly reference the knots and entanglements they all twist themselves into rather than any notion of marriage at all.

Incidentally, Eugenides also employed an interesting Rashomon-esque device (riffing off the Eng Lit discussions of the characters) in the later chapters which I'd rarely encountered elsewhere, where specific encounters and events told from a character's perspective in a chapter were subsequently retold from another's perspective. It's a small thing to highlight in a review but for what it's worth, I enjoyed it and it certainly helped to break up growing sense of blandness and predictability as the narrative wore on.

Wow. I consider myself fairly intelligent and with at least an average knowledge of books and authors. But reading The Marriage Plot made me realize how dumb I really am. Every other sentence contains an obscure literary or philosophical reference of which I have never heard. I'm quite interested in the three main characters--the woman and two men in the "love triangle" that begins in their 1980s college years at Brown University--but I can barely get through the constant allusions to philosophical and fictional literary "tropes" (I looked it up.)

Go ahead and hate my review if you will. I spent two weeks diligently plowing through 70 pages of this book. I'm sure it is wonderful, will probably win another Pulitzer for its brilliant author. But for me, reading it was like sitting between two members of the literary intelligentsia at a dinner party, as they try to one-up each other with the depth and breadth of their vast knowledge. I was simultaneously bored,lost and annoyed.

While I accept the premise of "The Marriage Plot" in literature, the claustrophobic world of Rhode Island's Brown University campus, the intimacies of the three protagonists and the endless particulars of the author's descriptions, I struggle throughout the novel to maintain interest in the characters as they act out the author's theme in real life, a formula writ long ago. The story begins with Madeleine Hanna's graduation ceremony, a girl fascinated with Victorian writers Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James, the ease and simplicity of regimented society, the men in her life viewed through that romantic prism, the molding of those we love into acceptable roles, a society married its vision of success. Life never delivers the expected, however- sometimes not even the acceptable- but Madeleine finds refuge in Victorian conventions, Eugenides waxing nostalgic for the putative good old days of the eighties, expounding freely on the college experience, laced liberally with the students' penchant for breaching intellectual boundaries, Greek life, a social milieu thriving in a mild political environment.

Daughter of privilege, Madeleine possesses natural beauty in abundance, a senior concentrating on her thesis, lately enamored of theory, philosophy and semiotics. She is helpless to resist the enigmatic Leonard Bankhead, who lives frugally and perhaps harbors deeper secrets. The third element of Eugenides' emotional ménage a trios is Mitchell Grammaticus, a young man deeply inspired by religious studies planning to travel to India, hopelessly in love with Madeleine, who sees only Leonard. Romance blooms with the inevitable heartbreak and dark passages, Madeleine hurling herself into a tormented dance with Leonard, who proves to be vastly more complicated than first appears, a Heathcliff with flaws as seductive as his brilliant mind. In chapters that shift perspective between Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell, Madeleine embraces Leonard's dark night of the soul, her lover sliding into a morass of gloom, chronic self-examination and psychiatric aids, his relationship with Madeleine seesawing from dominant to dependent and back again. Predictably, Mitchell is the drama's objective witness, even from India and his all-consuming quest for spirituality, or at least his idea of it.

Whatever joy is found in the beginning of this fiction becomes mired in the author's prose, obscure, mind-numbing details that suck the energy from the novel, an exhausting tale that evolves into irrelevancy by the end. Eugenides gets lost along the way, in love with his characters' intellectual pursuits and consummate angst, facilitating their ingrained habit of resolving their problems through agonies of indecision. Rather than inspire, the novel seems a great conceit, a scrapbook of the past collapsing under the burden of the protagonists' experiences, Leonard and Mitchell orbiting Madeleine's moon, doomed to their own spheres of gravity. The author writes with some depth on Leonard's emotional struggles, but none of these characters capture my imagination. Where, oh where is Jane Austen when you need her? Luan Gaines/2011.