The Marriage Plot

Early in the 1980s, the nation is experiencing a severe recession, and life after college is more difficult than ever. The hipster youngsters are listening to Talking Heads and reading Derrida at the cafés on College Hill. However, compliant English major Madeleine Hanna is focusing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, two writers who champion the marriage storyline at the center of the best English literature.

Real life steps in the form of two very different guys as Madeleine tries to figure out why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth century France." In a semiotics lecture, Leonard Bankhead—a charming recluse, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly appears. Madeleine quickly develops a highly charged sensual and intellectual connection with him. Concurrently, Mitchell Grammaticus, her former "friend" who has been reading Christian mysticism and behaving strangely in general, reappears, fixated on the notion that Madeleine is meant to be his partner.

Events drive the members of the triangle in this excellent, engrossing story to reassess what they learned in school when they graduate from college and join the real world over the course of the next year. After moving to a biology lab on Cape Cod, Leonard and Madeleine discover that there is a secret that is the source of both his apparently boundless energy and fluctuating emotions. Mitchell also encounters profound issues about the purpose of life, the existence of God, and the real essence of love while touring the globe in an attempt to move beyond Madeleine.

Do the classic romances of the 1800s no longer exist? Is a fresh narrative possible, one that takes into account the current context of feminism, sexual liberation, prenuptial agreements, and divorce? Jeffrey Eugenides resurrects the novel's inspiring energy with a biting wit and a deep knowledge and respect for his characters. He also crafts a tale that is so modern and novel that it seems like an intimate chronicle of our own lives.