Ron Charles reviews “The Marriage Plot,” by Jeffrey Eugenides
The novel’s first section, a 127-page masterpiece that takes place on graduation day, twists and soars through one witty, erudite, perfectly choreographed sentence after another. As the chords of “Pomp and Circumstance” hang in the Providence air, Madeleine’s academic history at Brown unfolds, spurred on and redirected by new critical fads in the English department. If Eugenides’s parody of French literary theory sometimes feels as fresh as the Reagan administration, we can forgive him because he’s so incredibly good at it.
Despite playing with the arch tones of a Regency novel, this part of the story takes place on a college campus in the early 1980s, which means these young people go about their courtships in the full swing of the sexual revolution. But this young woman’s name is Madeleine Hanna, not Charlotte Simmons, and we’re at Brown, not Duke, so “The Marriage Plot,” while comically frank about the students’ sexual prowess, doesn’t subject us to the bedroom antics of Tom Wolfe’s last book, whose subtlety lay somewhere between a biology textbook and a gay porn film. Part of Eugenides’s appeal in these pages is the decorum he somehow manages to maintain and mock at the same time.
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux) - “The Marriage Plot: A Novel” by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Post-graduation, the structure of the novel grows looser and the tone more erratic. Madeleine and both her beaux are knocked a little senseless by graduating from a top university in the midst of a moribund economy that has no use for them. (Show of hands: Can anyone relate to that?) In the novel’s most autobiographical section, Mitchell heads off to India to find himself: a search for meaning, for God, for some way to forget Madeleine. He’s endearing and earnest, and it’s nice to see a fiction writer who isn’t determined to torture a younger version of himself into humiliated disillusionment. Leonard, meanwhile, wins Madeleine’s heart and an impressive internship at a genetics research lab, even as his manic depression flares out of control. It’s a bleak picture of what it means to be in love with a mentally ill person, but his affliction appeals to Madeleine’s desire to play savior, a desire nurtured, of course, by some of her favorite novels.
These later sections are not as compelling, although the portrayal of life with a manic-depressive is distressing enough to shred anyone’s 19th-century illusions of romance. Eugenides is frighteningly perceptive about the challenges of mental illness, and much of what he writes here sounds like a more elegant version of the pharmacological satire Franzen delivered with such brio in “The Corrections.” A master of voice, from the perfectly calibrated voyeurs of “The Virgin Suicides” to the bifurcated consciousness of “Middlesex,” Eugenides delivers “The Marriage Plot” as a sympathetic omniscient narrator who can move unobtrusively into these three lovers’ minds, leaving just the faintest fingerprints of his light satire.
This is a story about being young and bright and lost, a story Americans have been telling since Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” Our exceptionally well-read but largely untested graduates still wonder: How should I live my life? What can I really believe in? Whom should I love? Literature has provided a wide range of answers to those questions — Lose Lady Brett! Give up on Daisy! Go with Team Edward! — but in the end, novels aren’t really very good guidebooks. Instead, they’re a chance to exercise our moral imagination, and this one provides an exceptionally witty and poignant workout.
Charles is The Post’s fiction editor. You can follow him on Twitter: @RonCharles.
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