Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - The Marriage Plot

Though this book could easily be called pretentious, and I don’t think it would be a bad assessment, there is so much depth to the lives of the three main characters and verisimilitude to the world in which they lived that I found myself totally engrossed, even when I felt disapprobation or frustration with the characters, even when the book was at its most pretentious. It rewards attentive, open-hearted reading. It’s a book about flawed, mostly very privileged people caught in a love triangle, but it’s also about the meta idea of a marriage plot and the function of marriage in a narrative. I’m really fond of people who struggle with narrativizing their lives, so despite their copious flaws, I found myself identifying with the ways in which the characters, especially Mitchell, were lost in their fantasies. I could easily see myself making the same mistakes Madeline did. I even identified with Leonard’s mania, and I found his struggles to be particularly impactful. The marriage plot hurt him, too.

I would not say that this is the book for everyone, but it was beautifully written and rendered. I want to go through it with a fine-toothed comb to examine the structure, the manipulation of time through flashback. It only takes place over the course of a year, and yet memories from these characters’ entire lives are woven in so seamlessly you feel as if you’ve followed them since birth. It’s a very intimate novel, in all the good and bad intimacy can bring, but despite, or likely because, of its heavy debt paid to previous works and its pretentions, it is surprisingly honest.

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arrowheartemoji's review against another edition

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reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

these characters would make me weep if the author wasn’t so insufferable. there are beautiful passages in this book, but it is clear that it is written by someone only capable of viewing the coming-of-age young man’s psyche as capable of true understanding of the world and worldly existence. I’ve not read anything else by this author so I don’t know if he writes women better anywhere else, but in this book, as much as he tries his hand at commentary on feminism, he falls very very flat. the blurb about the book makes it sound like madeleine is the main character with the two boys as the other points of this triangle, and while there’s not an issue with multiple povs, this book reads much more like a Mitchell-as-main-character novel than anything else. Madeleine’s entire narrative feels like it exists only to serve these men, and I don’t mean in a bechdel test way, I mean there are multiple passages in which I forget I’m even in madeleine’s pov because she feels so distant from everything that’s being written about.

Finally, I listened to the audiobook so I would just like to add that the narrator’s accent work is cringe at best and incredibly racist at worst. Ew.

a few final thoughts: some of the bits on religion, while dripping with eurocentrism, get close to profound. the passages about yeast genetics made me nostalgic for my old lab team. lots of people seem to hate Leonard but if you have mental or chronic illness, I think you will be more empathetic, or he will just make you very sad, like he did me. ok the end mwah <3 xoxo

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katmanica's review against another edition

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dark slow-paced

0.25

This entire review will contain spoilers, so I will wrap the rest in the spoiler tag.

Whilst I thought the discussion around mental ill health and bipolar disorder really important, I felt throughout that something wasn't quite right about its representation. The point of the novel was to follow the marriage plot, and the ways in which Madeleine truly loved Leonard. It explored how she fed on his episodes of mania, and that she didn't or wouldn't notice that there was a change in his behaviour because his changes made her feel good. I think that was a really honest exploration to how needing to conceal mental ill health is harmful to individuals with mental ill health. Basically, that Leonard had to hide his mental ill health because society judges and fears honesty around mental health, it put him in harms way. That conversation was important. Also, I didn't find any of the characters likeable, and I think that it was important to have unlikeable characters with mental ill health because it is reflective of real life.

That said: this book was so embedded in whiteness that I hate-read large portions of it. It envisioned the USA as entirely absent of nonwhite people. It used heavy-handed language to establish plot points. I.E., Mitchell was sitting "Indian" style or that he looked like a "swami" on the day of their graduation from Brown to introduce that he was going to be travelling to India. The stuff set in India was, yes probably a highlight of how white people go to India to save it in neocolonial ways, but could have benefited from being critical of that at any point--or even representing nonwhite people in joyous circumstances (as in not focusing on pain and poverty and bodily effluvia of nonwhite people). This is just one example, but the whole book was exhausting from being like this.
It was trying to be feminist, but then turned into being about Mitchell's development of empathy...his word, not mine. Letting the girl be free to make her own choices.

I also understand why other readers find the book pretentious. This book is very caught up in the idea of the natural genius--like the Romantic idea of the male genius. And, I thought we were over that trope.

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beetsnotbombs's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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