Here is a book that I really liked, but haven’t written anything about. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.
I got my hands on an early copy and read it this past July on vacation.
This book came out last month with much fan fare. If you missed it here is a shot of the billboard from Times Square:
Crazy for a literary book. eh?
Well, I don’t know if the billboard sold books, but this one deserves to be widely read. This is Eugenides attempt (successful in my book) at a postmodern love story. Madeleine and Leonard are young and in love – it’s the 1980s and they are steeped in college life. But while Leonard is quite brilliant he also tends to be very erratic. Meanwhile the Religious Studies student Mitchell has been in love with Madeleine since freshman year. I won’t tell you who ends up with who.
The story is captivating and the writing is never to wordy or verbose – I actually tended to think that Middlesex had some boring sections.
The secret to The Marriage Plot is that it makes the reader feel smarter. While you are reading about Madeleine’s post modern fiction class you feel like you are engaging with the Derrida or Barthes. Everyone in the store that has read this book has rushed over to the foreign fiction shelf and picked up Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse thinking they would read it as soon as they finished The Marriage Plot only to be thwarted by lines like “Everything follow from this principle: that the lover is not to be reduced to a simple symptomal subject, but rather that we hear in his voice what is “unreal” – sheesh.
At any rate, you should pick The Marriage Plot up, you won’t regret it.
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