Editors Reads Verdict
Less formally ambitious than Middlesex but more accessible — a literary campus novel that takes its subject (the Victorian marriage plot as dead form, and what happens when contemporary people try to live it anyway) seriously as both comedy and analysis.
What We Loved
- The literary-critical argument — that the marriage plot is exhausted as a form — is genuinely interesting and not merely decorative
- Leonard's bipolar disorder is rendered with clinical accuracy and human warmth
- The early 1980s campus setting is vividly evoked
Minor Drawbacks
- Madeleine is less interesting than either of the men, which is a problem for a novel nominally centred on her
- The lit-crit apparatus occasionally overwhelms the human drama it is supposed to frame
Key Takeaways
- → The Victorian marriage plot — the form in which the novel's value was measured by who the heroine married — is structurally incompatible with contemporary women's lives
- → Bipolar disorder is not a source of artistic genius — it is an illness with specific costs that its romanticisation ignores
- → The person who loves most reliably is not always the person who is loved
| Author | Jeffrey Eugenides |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Pages | 406 |
| Published | October 11, 2011 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Romance |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Eugenides readers who want his most recent and accessible novel, and literary fiction readers who enjoy campus novels with a strong theoretical dimension. |
The Thesis
Madeleine Hanna is writing a senior thesis on the marriage plot — the formal structure of the Victorian novel in which the narrative question is who the heroine will marry and the answer determines the story’s meaning. She has been reading Roland Barthes and is being taught, by the semiotics seminars Brown is offering in 1982, that this form is exhausted, that the readerly pleasure it provides is ideological, that the text has displaced the author. She finds this convincing intellectually and irrelevant personally, because she is in love with Leonard Bankhead and cannot reason herself out of it.
Leonard Bankhead is the most interesting person at Brown, which is a place full of interesting people. He is also, it becomes clear gradually and then all at once, bipolar. Mitchell Grammaticus has been in love with Madeleine for three years, knows she does not return it, and leaves for India and a study of comparative religion when graduation arrives.
The Argument About Form
Eugenides is using the campus setting to stage a genuine argument: the marriage plot is dead as a literary form, but its emotional structure — the hope that the right union will resolve the central question of your life — is still very much alive in the people who have been taught that it is dead. Madeleine lives the plot her thesis is dismantling. Mitchell lives the counter-plot (religion, self-denial, removal from the narrative). Leonard is the one who cannot live any plot for long enough to reach an ending.
The novel does not resolve the argument so much as embody it.
Our rating: 3.9/5 — Eugenides’s most accessible novel: an intelligent campus romance that uses literary theory as more than window dressing.
Reading Guides
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Marriage Plot" about?
Brown University, early 1980s. Madeleine Hanna is writing her senior thesis on the Victorian marriage plot in literary fiction; Mitchell Grammaticus is having a religious crisis; Leonard Bankhead is brilliant, charismatic, and bipolar. Their triangular relationship unfolds against the backdrop of literary theory and manic depression.
Who should read "The Marriage Plot"?
Eugenides readers who want his most recent and accessible novel, and literary fiction readers who enjoy campus novels with a strong theoretical dimension.
What are the key takeaways from "The Marriage Plot"?
The Victorian marriage plot — the form in which the novel's value was measured by who the heroine married — is structurally incompatible with contemporary women's lives Bipolar disorder is not a source of artistic genius — it is an illness with specific costs that its romanticisation ignores The person who loves most reliably is not always the person who is loved
Is "The Marriage Plot" worth reading?
Less formally ambitious than Middlesex but more accessible — a literary campus novel that takes its subject (the Victorian marriage plot as dead form, and what happens when contemporary people try to live it anyway) seriously as both comedy and analysis.
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