jeffrey eugenides the marriage plot review

Her mother sends cautionary articles about getting involved with a man who is mentally ill. In love with Leonard, Maddy is attentive, devoted and frustrated. Lithium, the standard at the time, left many of its patients somnambulant and dull, and Leonard is dogged by the sense that he can’t keep pace with his new colleagues.

She checks him out of a hospital, medicated, so he can begin a prestigious science fellowship on Cape Cod. But he has a hard time staying balanced: He’s got a case of manic depression severe enough that both his highs and his lows can be crippling. He’s wildly intelligent and cut a unique figure on the Brown campus, wearing a leather jacket, chewing tobacco and being magnetically moody. As the summer begins, Maddy and Leonard reconcile and Mitchell takes off to backpack for a year in Europe and India, still carrying a torch.Īll is not easy for Madeleine and Leonard. Mitchell’s middle-class youth outside Detroit left him sartorially challenged, but it was firm enough to launch him into a philosophical study of religion. Leonard had a dysfunctional childhood in Portland, Ore., with alcoholic parents and late-breaking academic success. Maddy, tall and beautiful, was brought up by a private university president and his always-proper wife she tries out different aspects of her personality through various college boyfriends. Meanwhile, her old friend Mitchell pines for Maddy, convinced that someday he’ll marry her.Įugenides switches points of view among Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard, edging the plot forward slightly as he fills in the back story. That’s why she took a class from a famed semiotics professor, where she met Leonard, the handsome biology student who has left her brokenhearted and rudderless. From the distance of 2011, we know that such novels have survived just fine, thank you very much, but Madeleine is trapped inside her time, feeling that she’s falling short. This is the world in which Madeleine wakes up, hungover, on her graduation day in Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, “The Marriage Plot.” She’s at Brown, a hot center of postmodernism, yet Madeleine can’t shake her affection for unfashionable novelists like Jane Austen and Henry James. In the early 1980s, Charles Dickens was out Donald Barthelme was in. Language was slippery, its meaning elusive, narrative old-fashioned, they said the straightforward march of an imagined story across a page was a sham. This was after the French theorist invasion, when the ideas of Lacan and Derrida caught fire with American academics, turning the study of English inside out. For a while there, it looked like the novel was a goner.

Jeffrey eugenides the marriage plot review