A review by frogwithlittlehammer
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

emotional reflective

4.75

Reconstructing deconstructions of love. Ever-relatable post graduate malaise. English major slander. Quaker praise. Religion as mania and mania as ritual. “The novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance.” It’s true that certain liberations have a side effect of deintensifying relations, feelings, narratives (in which it’s ironic how modifying the law to create freedoms for some only contribute to reifying the legal system and the idea of rights and entitlements as tangible matter.)

I’m really trying to recall what I might have hated about Eugenides’ writing of Madeleine when I DNFed. Because this time around, I found all the characters extremely human, with that certain air of helpless hedonism and fastidiousness despite flirting with the void that I enjoy so much. I loved the likewise humanistic yet often cruel depiction of the parents. I especially enjoyed the dialectics between each of the three main characters and their respective majors, and how in turn they all seem to bleed into the other. Leonard’s chicken-and-the-egg interest in mystic events in relation to religious discovery, Mitchell’s questioning of Victorian endings which are about a different kind of love, Madeleine’s tendency to tackle the tumors of her life methodologically, whether through dissecting Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse (which I’m reading now 🤭) to rationalize her lovesickness, or submerging herself in scientific journals and closely monitoring symptoms in order to feign control of a helplessly unraveling situation. 

I don’t know if the novel succeeds in its attempt at the modern Victorian marriage plot. It is not so much a novel about love or marriage, as it is about misunderstanding love. Kind of like the Fiona Apple lyric, “This is not about love, cause I am not in love.” However, it’s a quick read despite its page count, that manages to address questions of a large philosophical scale without being too in your face about it (at least, I found.) Definitely will get me to read the other two in the Eugenides’ trifecta, don’t get all the hate.

My DNF review:

How can The Virgin Suicides (at least the movie lolz) be so good and this be so man-writing-woman 🥱