Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot
Until maybe halfway through this book, I kept thinking I'd end up blogging things like "This is a solid story, but the angsty 80s college characters feel like the kind of thing that any of the Great White Males could have written, and not as special as I'd expect a book by Eugenides to be" or "Yeah, that one character is totally a David Foster Wallace type of guy." But at a certain point I got so caught up in things that I stopped thinking "What do I think about this book?" and was just racing through it. Not to say the first half is bad--I loved all the stuff about academia, religious studies, the burgeoning literary theory field, and the Jane Austen mentions--but things get much more engaging once the trifecta of characters (Leonard, the DFW type; Madeline, the rich girl who loves him and loves novels; and Mitchell, the Eugenides analogue, who loves her and is about to spend a year backpacking around Europe and India) are out of college and trying to make their way as adults in the first year after graduating. It may sound like a small story the way I'm describing it, but Eugenides' writing is as epic as ever. I worried I'd be disappointed after seeing some mixed reviews, but I loved this. A.
I think I loved it, but no matter what I ultimately decide about this book, I know that I love this dude's writing. I identified with Madeleine so much (of course!) and now I want to go to Columbia and take those classes.
ReplyDeleteI tend to miss the point with smart girls in novels - like I got all stressed that the main character in the Bell Jar would lose her scholarship even though she was losing her mind!
I want to see more of what happens to these characters - especially Mitchell.
I would totally read a sequel all about Madeleine as a professor!
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