Although Eugenides is not the most prolific of his authorial peers "The Marriage Plot" is his third book in his 20-year career as a novelist he has enjoyed an enviable literary career. His first novel, "The Virgin Suicides" (1993) was turned into an award-winning film directed by Sofia Coppola. "Middlesex" (2002) received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003. "The Marriage Plot," released on Oct. 11, is already being hailed by critics in The New York Times Book Review and the Chronicle of Higher Education, and rightfully so.
While the topics that Eugenides covers seem almost commonplace on the surface, the characters that inhabit the book's pages are refreshingly original. Madeleine is an aimless English major easily distracted by both love and literature. Mitchell is a prospective theologian whose intellectual luster contrasts his quasi-adolescent pining for Madeleine. Leonard is a manic-depressive and hopeful biologist whose volatile moods and unrelenting melancholy infuse complexity into his relationship with Madeleine.
The richness of Eugenides's prose in "The Marriage Plot" supports the "write what you know" trope. Eugenides derived much of the material for his latest opus from his own life experiences. Like Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell, Eugenides attended Brown University and crossed over to the adult world in the early 1980s. Also like Mitchell, Eugenides grew up in Detroit and traveled to India after graduation.
Eugenides paints a snarky but shrewd picture of college life, ranting about fraternities as environments in which "the hazing the pledges underwent enacted the very fears of male rape and emasculation that membership in the fraternity promised protection against." He also writes that "English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in." These jabs suggest not only Eugenides' strong memory of his college days, but also his familiarity with the milieu of his protagonists.
Eugenides's familiarity with this climate enriches his illustrations of the setting and brings to life the inner experiences of his characters. In one scene, for example, he writes about "The pornographic Egon Schiele drawings by the [Rhode Island School of Design] kid on the second floor whose subtext conveyed the message that the wholesome, patriotic values of her parents' generation were now on the ash heap of history, replaced by a nihilistic, post-punk sensibility that Madeleine herself didn't understand but was perfectly happy to scandalize her parents by pretending that she did."
The real strength of "The Marriage Plot" lies in the poignant way in which Eugenides weaves the literary themes that Madeleine studies Victorian plots and the ideas of French literary theorist Ronald Barthes into the trajectory of his own novel. The love triangle between Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard as well as Madeleine's eventual marriage to Leonard signal a modern twist on the Victorian plot. Leonard's refusal to tell Madeleine that he loves her points to Barthes's problematization of the articulation of love sentiments in "A Lover's Discourse," highlighting a college student's nave implementation of this theory. This infusion of literary ideas into the somewhat universal experiences of the characters is what most elevates "The Marriage Plot" from a coming-of-age story to a critically acclaimed work.
"The Marriage Plot" is replete with philosophical ideas and impressive insights into the human condition. Yet at the end of his latest opus, Eugenides refrains from any final references to Barthes or Victorian literary theory, concluding instead with a plain but profound final emphasis on the ties between literature and life experiences.
