Jeremy is Reading: The Marriage Plot

I think that everyone who read Jeffrey Eugenides' magisterial novel Middlesex has been eagerly awaiting his next book; this has turned out to require a lot of patience because it has taken almost a decade for his new novel, The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), to reach our shelves (in the respect of making his fans wait patiently for a new book for ten years or so, Eugenides resembles Jonathan Franzen). It certainly has been worth the wait.

The books are quite different: Middlesex had a broad historical sweep, with wonderful descriptions of the protagonist's Greek ancestors in Turkey and in the course of the emigration to the US (and specifically to Detroit). The Marriage Plot, on the other hand, is the story of a romantic triangle, two men and one woman, students at Brown University in the class of 1982, and takes place there and in the immediately following years.

The centerpiece of the triangle is Madeleine, an English major who grew up in a rather affluent suburb, is very beautiful, and is regarded as "normal", although the appearance is rather deceptive. Mitchell met her in freshman year and was totally smitten but also paralyzed from moving the relationship to something other than an intermittent friendship; he becomes more and more immersed in religious studies at school and winds up for an extended period in India helping at one of the hospitals operated by Mother Teresa (this section was recently excerpted in The New Yorker).

But Madeleine in turn is smitten with Leonard, a much wilder and much less stable type, who totally dominates her until he turns out to be incapable of caring for himself and submits totally to her care. We meet the parents of each of the three and some of their friends and colleagues, and learn how each became what they did. Each is quirky in some way, utterly original and fully fleshed out in Eugenides' wonderful prose. The "marriage plot" of the title is actually supposed to be a convention of Nineteenth Century fiction, in which the characters were always jockeying around to see who would marry whom; Madeleine actually writes a thesis on this topic, which of course is also very relevant to the plot of this book.

The book is also filled with wonderful references to a lot of earlier literature (especially of course those works exemplifying the "marriage plot"); clearly the reader sees the author's relationship to the grand literary tradition, while all the while remaining uniquely himself and writing a book that no one else today could write. As I said, The Marriage Plot was well worth the wait.

— Jeremy Nussbum