The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides has seen his stock rise dramatically since his first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993. At the time, The Virgin Suicides seemed like a cult book at best, perfect for angsty teens, but not the work of a heavyweight. In retrospect, the writing is unremarkable, and the worldview seems rather trite. However, the success of the film adaptation, and the broader scope of his Pulitzer-winning follow up, Middlesex (2002), have massively enhanced his reputation, and the publication of his latest novel, The Marriage Plot, has become something of a literary event. He has been chosen, along with Alan Hollinghurst, as a writer of sufficient stature to bookend the Manchester Literature Festival, and has enjoyed excellent reviews in the broadsheet arts supplements.

Much has been made of the shifting narrative focus of Eugenides’s novels. The Virgin Suicides is essentially a domestic drama, seen through the eyes of a group of boys, trying to piece together evidence in retrospect. Middlesex employed an omniscient narrator, blurring gender divides, crossing continents and mapping a family’s history over generations. The Marriage Plot seems more self-contained, focussing on the lives of three students in the build up to their graduations in the summer of 1982. Whilst the book focuses on a love triangle, though, Eugenides gradually widens his remit, as he delves into the characters’ pasts, and follows them into Europe and Asia.

Again, we see characters haunted by a deeply rooted problem. For the brooding, brilliant Leonard, it is the Manic Depression which has affected him since childhood. Mitchell, his competition for Madeline’s love, struggles with his religious faith and self doubt. The main focus of the book, Madeline, appears well-balanced, but is forced to adjust her worldview to accommodate the problems presented by her suitors, and the thought that her principles and tastes are outdated in an age of academic revolution.

The first difficulty faced by Madeline is the challenge presented to her love of traditional English literature by the radical notions of semiotics, which have ripped through academe, and filtered through to her sleepy Eastern college. This section is the most enjoyable part of the novel; Eugenides has an excellent ear for the pretensions of undergraduate seminars and Union bars. Semiotics is a perfect context in which to describe the self-conscious, hyper-analytical world of the final year student, trying to find an ideology to inhabit, and recreate their personalities in readiness for adulthood and independence. Whereas Tom Woolf, in his 2004 campus novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, described college life in anthropological terms, Eugenides penetrates further into the minds of his subjects, bringing to life their self doubts and taking a less critical tone.

The novel contrasts the essentially cosy nature of campus life with the harsh realities of the world outside. To force this point, characters are sent to Europe, where Madeline is confronted by the realities of Leonard’s mania, and India, where Mitchell comes face to face with poverty and disease in Mother Theresa’s Home for the Dying. Interestingly, Eugenides quotes a passage from Malcolm Muggeridge’s ‘Something Beautiful for God’, in which he ascribes a miracle to the nun, and which was torn apart, at length, by Christopher Hitchens in God is Not Great. The use of this discredited text foreshadows Mitchell’s own disappointment in Calcutta.

The action of the novel drifts geographically, but the reader’s interest is maintained by the ever-changing set of allegiances formed by the central characters, and their struggles to adapt to circumstances. This combination of broad narrative scope with detailed emotional descriptions is Eugenides’s major strength, which was not permitted by the closely confined setting of The Virgin Suicides. The Marriage Plot is affecting, funny and well-judged. You suspect that he particularly enjoyed writing the Campus sections, as reflected in the gently humorous tone of the opening chapters.

Maybe there is another reason why Hollinghurst and Eugenides are appropriate choices to open and close Manchester Literature Festival – both writers are able to create novels with real substance, scope and literary quality, which are also readable enough to ensure they achieve popular as well as critical acclaim. Maybe The Marriage Plot isn’t as great an achievement as Middlesex, but it is still well worth your attention.