The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, Fourth Estate $29.95
The marriage plot was the staple of the great English novels of the 19th century so what, you might wonder, is the thoroughly modern author of the Pulitzer prize-winning Middlesex doing re-tilling this field?
Subverting it, is the answer. Setting the ideals of happy-ever-after love against the realities of courtship and romance in the 1980s, the era of feminism, sexual liberation and the pre-nup.
His chief characters — specimens, really — are three young American college students: uptown girl and Jane Austen admirer Madeleine; her lover, the brilliant but mentally unstable Leonard, and her friend Mitchell, struggling with own his spirituality though convinced that Madeleine’s true destiny is to be his wife.
They’re a clever, bookish trio but, of course, the path does not run smooth — not for any of them. Eugenides’ real story turns out to be less about love than about the eternal drama of growing up and discovering where the plots and plans of youth end, real life begins.
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