Jeffrey Eugenides’s new novel, “The Marriage Plot,” starts down the aisle sparkling with humor like a modern version of “Pride and Prejudice,” but before reaching the altar, it veers into the romantic disappointments of “The Portrait of a Lady” and finally descends perilously close to “Ethan Frome.” Which is to say, this is a story about romance and novels — and the bright young people who read them. Or misread them.
For a long time now, we’ve been anxious about novels’ potential to delude us — or usually others. Thomas Jefferson warned that novel reading causes “a bloated imagination, sickly judgment, and disgust towards all the real businesses of life” (which didn’t stop him from carrying on some novel-worthy business with Sally Hemings). No less a pioneer of domestic fiction than Flaubert was hauled into court for his misleading portrait of an adulterer in “Madame Bovary.” And recall that Jane Austen, the grandmother of romantic comedy, wrote her first book, “Northanger Abbey,” about a young lady whose sensibilities were wildly distorted by reading too many gothic novels.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) - “The Marriage Plot: A Novel” by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Eugenides’s love affair with fiction embraces all those contradictions: the novel’s potential to confuse and enlighten, to teach what love is really like even while confusing us with impossible ideals. For hundreds of years, literate people have drawn their impressions of sexual and social intercourse from plots about marriage, and now this sophisticated modern writer has produced a novel of his own about the persistence of “the marriage plot” in an unromantic world.
Eugenides is a nobly unprolific author for such a successful writer, which makes his body of work difficult to categorize. In 20 years, he has published just enough novels to form a triangle. His cool and creepy debut, “The Virgin Suicides” (1993), captured the collective voice of a neighborhood of boys who pine for the self-destructive Lisbon sisters. That carefully crafted novel had little in common with the voracious vision of “Middlesex” (2002), a story of cultural and sexual conflation that won the Pulitzer Prize. And now, just as surprisingly, he’s produced a romantic comedy wrapped around an academic satire that looks like the sprightly love child of Allegra Goodman and Jonathan Franzen.
On its most basic level, the plot of “The Marriage Plot” is so antique it could be wearing a corset: Madeleine Hanna is an attractive young woman of respectable means, the daughter of a college president and a matron of impeccable rectitude. We meet our bibliophilic heroine on the very day she graduates from Brown University with a degree in English and a large collection of classic novels that marks her as “Incurably Romantic.” For many readers, the opening shot of Madeleine’s bookshelf, described by a narrator of refined charm, will inspire love at first sight, which is exactly the kind of fantasy that has led Madeleine — hungover, panicked and tardy — so far astray.
She must choose between two strikingly different suitors who are desperately in love with her. And the fact that she thinks she must choose — at the ripe age of 22 — gives an indication of just how contaminated Madeleine has been by her study of 18th- and 19th-century fiction. On one side is Mitchell Grammaticus, an earnest young man engaged in a spiritual quest, who knows, as only a young man in love can, that he’s meant to spend his life with her. Competing with him for Madeleine’s affections is Leonard Bankhead, a sexy, manic-depressive genius from a poor family. Naturally, Mitchell doesn’t stand a chance.
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