The Marriage Plot

By Jeffrey Eugenides, 406 pages, Picador, 2011
Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski, May 18, 2020

In the last half-dozen years, I have despaired that novels with elevated ambition – that is, not the silly stuff by the likes of Carl Hiaasen or even solid mysteries by skilled writers of suspense – had become petrified.

Dismay would set in whenever I picked up a new, well-regarded novel and discovered that what action there was, was mostly in the minds of the characters. Nobody did anything; they simply lolled around perceiving, judging, moping, envying, assessing, feeling, and when I say feeling, I mean feeling bad, disappointed, empty, as if suffering from hangovers even if they had skipped the fun of the pre-hangover preliminaries.

I have wanted to say, “Get up. Go outside. Play badminton. Sit on a park bench and squirt toothpaste at passersby. Polish silverware. Drop grapes on a supermarket floor.”

So I was pleased to discover that in “The Marriage Plot,” the three main characters constantly are doing things that make them unhappy. Yes, but actively unhappy.

In fact, the protagonist, Madeleine Hanna awakens one late spring morning in 1982, hung over (but it’s a legitimately earned hangover), mortally embarrassed because she is still wearing her night-before black dress that now has a stain in a prominent place, depressed because of the breakup with her boyfriend, pissed off because her parents are banging on her front door. It is supposed to be one of the happiest days of her life.

In a few hours, Madeleine is graduating from Brown. (I graduated from Red. Technically, Big Red. The University of Nebraska.)

Everything goes wrong: the unsettling breakfast with her overbearing parents, the painful guilt over her behavior the night before, her clumsy accidental reunion with a former non-boyfriend, the contentious fusses with her judgmental roommates, the humiliating realization that her English degree, which is supposed to herald the start of her glorious career, is worth no more than that stain on her dress.

It's all hilarious.

That’s the first one-third of the book. So when I tell you that the remaining 270-some pages include the paralysis of unrequited love, the terror of untreated mental illness, the squalor in the unsanitary slums of Calcutta, you’re probably thinking: “What is this, a Marx Brothers’ movie?”

Oddly, however, the black humor of the early pages fades to a pallid gray as Madeleine and the classmates who either love her (Mitchell Grammaticus) or marry her (Leonard Bankhead) emerge warily into the real world.

Why does Eugenides shift from poking fun at superficialities to piling up post-diploma angst? It must be intended as a prolonged image: College is the worst possible place to prepare for reality.

Madeleine, beautiful and adept at tennis, seems to have but one skill: reading. Mitchell, mad about Maddy but perpetually playing Hamlet as a suitor, majors in religious studies and does a couple of harrowing weeks at Mother Teresa’s mission in Calcutta, then flunks that and flops onto a Manhattan sofa. Leonard, so brilliant, so muddled by mental illness, so good in bed, botches a prestigious science internship that requires him to study the microscopic activity of yeast cells, goes on a world-record honeymoon toot in Monaco and lands in the hospital, sulkily ruins a rare happy day for Madeleine, then is last reported to be camping out somewhere in Oregon. You all know where that is. Oregon, I mean.

I really wanted to like “The Marriage Plot,” and much of the time, I did. Eugenides has an enviably relaxed sense of humor – “Lithium was very good at inducing a mental state in which taking lithium seemed like a good idea” – and he keeps action moving, two reader-pleasing skills. His flashbacks are particularly deft, filling in blanks I hadn’t realized were left blank.

But I can’t shake the feeling that he started on one book – Let’s make fun of the young and the aimless! – then when he was 130 or so pages into that story, he didn’t know what to do next, so he created a lot of dramatic situations as he clattered around searching for an ending.

An ending that, incidentally, seems a cop-out, which I guess is the best proof that Eugenides was still searching, even as late as Page 406.

Hey, not every book has to end perfectly, and if you’re going to read 406 pages of fiction at some point this year, being in the company of Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell is frequently enjoyable, if not fully rewarding.

One caution, especially for those of you who are squeamish: There are some explicit sex scenes in “The Marriage Plot,” and not all of them are between yeast cells.