Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
Jeffrey Eugenides had a tough task ahead of him with The Marriage Plot. After the brilliant success of the chilling, dream-like The Virgin Suicides and the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic Middlesex, his long-anticipated follow-up was always either going to be received in one of two ways: rapturously praised as yet another work of genius, or dismissed as a complete disappointment.
The Marriage Plot takes on much simpler, more ordinary subject matter than his previous two novels. Set in the1980s, the story centres around three Brown graduates- brilliant, well-read and entirely clueless about how to live. Starting on graduation day, the novel slips back a few years to fill in some of the blanks of their overlapping stories, then follows them through their first year out of college as they play at adulthood, fumbling their way through “the real world” of love, marriage, academicism and religion.
First there’s Madeleine, the object of the other two’s affections. Dark-haired, beautiful and from a sheltered, well-off family in the suburbs of New Jersey, she is described within the first few pages as “incurably romantic.” She loves the Victorian novel and writes her honours thesis on “the marriage plot” in the works of her favourite authors like Jane Austen and Henry James. In a semiotics class, she meets and falls in love with Leonard, a brilliant and mesmerising science major who is shackled by the violent pulls of manic depression. Then there’s Mitchell, obsessed both with Madeleine and discovering some kind of meaning in religion, whose existential yearnings take him to Kolkata to volunteer (albeit briefly) with Mother Theresa.
The story is a simple love triangle at its heart, but it also plays at pulling apart ideas about love and marriage and all its complications. Eugenides is enquiring whether “the marriage plot” is still a meaningful literary form, when marriage hardly seems a satisfying goal for these characters with such wild, youthful aspirations. The idea of romance is explored in academic terms – Madeleine becomes obsessed with Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which claims that humans would not experience romantic love unless we had read about it first, and her growing infatuation with Leonard becomes troublingly entangled with her intellectual ideas.
With these sorts of segues into critical theory and its endless literary references, many readers have disparaged the book as pretentious, but it’s very possible to read Eugenides’ constant posturing and name-dropping as self-aware and ironic. This is a novel about being young and intellectual but kind of clueless about how to live, so it’s fitting that such well-read Ivy League students would turn to Derrida and Foucault and Barthes in an attempt to cultivate the self, that they would find solace and satisfaction in esoteric and canonical books that use complicated theories to explain quite simple things, to fill the gap of real-world knowledge that still eludes them.
The tragedy of The Marriage Plot is ostensibly Leonard’s struggles with mental illness, but another, quieter sadness permeates the novel – the way Madeleine’s life gradually diminishes behind the screen of Leonard’s needs. Though her character is introduced as the centre of the story, as the novel progresses she becomes almost wholly reactive, responding to the desires and actions of her two suitors. There are little flashes of her independence sparking up, but on the whole she has less of a “journey” than the other two, instead receding and becoming almost irrelevant by the end of the book.
Without the heaviness and difficult topics that Eugenides tackles with such flair in his previous works, it’s very easy to dismiss this book as frivolous, but there are layers beneath the light and easy tone of The Marriage Plot that make this both an enjoyable and thought-provoking novel, and one that has more impact and relevance than you might at first imagine.