The Marriage Plot — Jeffery Eugenides
I really wanted to love The Marriage Plot as much as I loved Jeffery Eugenides’ previous novels. The incredible prose is still there. The keen characterizations are present. And there are moments when the book reaches peaks of greatness. But they are peaks only and are interspersed with a few disappointing valleys.
The book is primarily a meditation on the marriage plot itself, that uniquely antiquated (or is it?) trope of Jane Austin and her ilk. When the story begins, Madeleine, our heroine, is set to graduate from college. She has studied and written extensively on the marriage plot as an undergraduate. Of course in modern times, this would more likely be termed a love triangle, but in the nineteenth century and before, such a geometric description did not exist. Madeleine soon finds herself in a marriage plot of her own, which she doesn’t quite realize at the outset. The three points of the love triangle (Madeleine, plus her two male suitors) are flawed characters. The problem is that the flaws left me feeling ambivalent instead of sympathetic. I realize this is a fine line and that different readers will find themselves on different sides of the line. I usually want to root for flawed characters and hope that they’ll learn from their mistakes, even if it’s unlikely that they will. In The Marriage Plot, I knew they wouldn’t learn. The lack of hope turned me off and kept a very good writer from writing another great book.
