'The Marriage Plot' by Jeffrey Eugenides

Boychik Lit Book Reviews - No. 2 - KRLA 870 AM Los Angeles
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides poses the question: “Does a love story that ends in marriage have any relevance today?” Time was, back in Jane Austen’s nineteenth-century Britain, whether the heroine snagged the man of her dreams made all the difference. He would be handsome, tender, and – best of all – rich. Doesn’t sound too P. C. does it? But that’s essentially the plot of chick-lit novels like Sex and the City.
 
In a man’s take on the subject, The Marriage Plot hinges on a love triangle first joined on a college campus. There’s a shy man who wants to help starving children, a neurotic woman who has a big heart, and a brilliant biochemist who has serious mental problems. Ultimately, this is a novel about perception, what we make of reality as it is happening to us, and our inability to make meaning of events in time to control their outcome. Things happen or they don't. Things work out or they don't. They mostly don't, and we move on. Bad news for self-help gurus who are helping you make plans. Way to make God laugh.

For Boychik Lit, I’m Gerald Everett Jones. Read my hilarious new novel Mr.Ballpoint, and follow my rants at www.boychiklit.com.

From my longer review cross-posted on Goodreads.com:

The Marriage Plot is masterful on many levels. At first I wasn't drawn to any of the three characters in the love triangle - Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell. Each seemed deeply flawed, and they are. Except you read along and find that Eugenides thinks we all are, just as deeply in our unique ways, and are none the lesser for it. That's the way people are, and the way life goes. We stumble through it, thinking we are somehow in control, and it's what happens nevertheless while we are furiously busy making other plans, or simply fretting about making up our minds.

This is a literary novel, in the best sense, and I was surprised to read some critics cramming it into the diminutive genre "campus novel." That would be like classifying Pride and Prejudice as a rom com, which is not as irrelevant as it sounds. The marriage plot, you see, is the genre form of which that work is representative. Eugenides wants to know whether the marriage plot is dead as a meaningful literary form, now that marriage seems hardly worthy as the ultimate goal of youthful aspirations.

Then there's the theme of semiotics. I studied with Roland Barthes (yes, I'm that old) and back then I don't think the term semiotics even existed. At least, I don't recall his ever having used it. But he talked incessantly about structuralism, that a novel is a long sentence spoken by its author, a literary construct waiting to be parsed. Understand, I didn't get any of this from him back then, just from what others, including Susan Sontag, have written about him since. His lesson plan was built around Balzac's short story "Sarrasine," which is the engrossing tale of a man obsessed by an opera star who turns out to be both a castralto and the "kept woman" of a powerful priest. But why Barthes chose that story for his criticism totally escaped me at the time, and I can only surmise now what his intentions were.

But back to Eugenides. The characters meet in a semiotics class at Brown, and the author gives a lot of detail about the subject and its impact on their personal thoughts. Semiotics claims, for example, that humans would not experience love as we have come to understand it unless we had read about it (or seen movies about it) first. There's a similar concept in Stendhal's The Red and the Black, in which the narrator comments that peasants in the French countryside cope with life less well than the sophisticated citizens of Paris, who have all read novels that give them models for how to act in society.

Ultimately, this is a novel about perception, what we make of reality as it is happening to us, and our inability to make meaning of events in time to control their outcome. Things happen or they don't. Things work out or they don't. They mostly don't, and we move on.

Perhaps significantly, the character in this book who understands himself best is the one whose grasp on reality is most tenuous, because he has to work at staying sane. In his acknowledgements, Eugenides credits several experts and sources for genetic research (another theme), but he thanks no one for his extensive detailing of bipolar disorder and its treatment. So naturally I wonder how he came by this information, and at what personal cost. (An astute Goodreads commentator observed that Eugenides was a close personal friend of David Foster Wallace, a brilliant novelist who suffered from bipolar disorder and committed suicide.)

Book Review: "The Marriage Plot" by Jeffrey Eugenides

[Cross-posted on Goodreads.com]
The Marriage Plot is masterful on many levels. At first I wasn't drawn to any of the three characters in the love triangle - Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell. Each seemed deeply flawed, and they are. Except you read along and find that Eugenides thinks we all are, just as deeply in our unique ways, and are none the lesser for it. That's the way people are, and the way life goes. We stumble through it, thinking we are somehow in control, and it's what happens nevertheless while we are furiously busy making other plans, or simply fretting about making up our minds.

This is a literary novel, in the best sense, and I was surprised to read some critics cramming it into the diminutive genre "campus novel." That would be like classifying Pride and Prejudice as a rom com, which is not as irrelevant as it sounds. The marriage plot, you see, is the genre form of which that work is representative. Eugenides wants to know whether the marriage plot is dead as a meaningful literary form, now that marriage seems hardly worthy as the ultimate goal of youthful aspirations.

Then there's the theme of semiotics. I studied with Roland Barthes (yes, I'm that old) and back then I don't think the term semiotics even existed. At least, I don't recall his ever having used it. But he talked incessantly about structuralism, that a novel is a long sentence spoken by its author, a literary construct waiting to be parsed. Understand, I didn't get any of this from him back then, just from what others, including Susan Sontag, have written about him since. His lesson plan was built around Balzac's short story "Sarrasine," which is the engrossing tale of a man obsessed by an opera star who turns out to be both a castralto and the "kept woman" of a powerful priest. But why Barthes chose that story for his criticism totally escaped me at the time, and I can only surmise now what his intentions were.

But back to Eugenides. The characters meet in a semiotics class at Brown, and the author gives a lot of detail about the subject and its impact on their personal thoughts. Semiotics claims, for example, that humans would not experience love as we have come to understand it unless we had read about it (or seen movies about it) first. There's a similar concept in Stendhal's The Red and the Black, in which the narrator comments that peasants in the French countryside cope with life less well than the sophisticated citizens of Paris, who have all read novels that give them models for how to act in society.

Ultimately, this is a novel about perception, what we make of reality as it is happening to us, and our inability to make meaning of events in time to control their outcome. Things happen or they don't. Things work out or they don't. They mostly don't, and we move on.

Perhaps significantly, the character in this book who understands himself best is the one whose grasp on reality is most tenuous, because he has to work at staying sane. In his acknowledgements, Eugenides credits several experts and sources for genetic research (another theme), but he thanks no one for his extensive detailing of bipolar disorder and its treatment. So naturally I wonder how he came by this information, and at what personal cost

Guest Post: A Male Weighs in on A Female Perspective to Boychik Lit and related topics

Well, some of my favorite female writers are women. There's Emily Bronte, Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Virginia Wolfe, and of course some others like the beautiful poet Anne Waldman. Have I misspelled some of these names? How condescending of me. What makes these women all better writers than I? Well, they've all got teats, for one thing. Most of them had to put on a brassiere before they could go out in public, or even to write, and put it on over both teats, and that's a hard thing for me as a man to imagine. Is this mild form of sartorial torture a character-building exercise? There's no man that's as manly as Heathcliff ... and to think some poor girl had to put on her brassiere and sit down at a writing table far out on the moors and imagine the curly-haired romantic cad. I don't think the suffering that kicked the creativity into high gear came from having to lean farther over the writing table than I would have, even if I had a writing table. No, the girls had to create men in their books so that women would buy them. This is admittedly a bigger stretch for me than for a woman, and perhaps that's the fount of their creativity. For me to create fascinating, believable men is as easy as poop. But for women? The girls worked for it with their brassieres on. Didn't they?