A review by khornstein1
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

4.0

Through the misty goggles of time, I sometimes remember reviews that appeared in the teen magazines of my youth. In particular I remember one of a once-popular TV show: "Eight is Enough: A Heavy Brady Bunch?" Indeed it was. Both shows dealt with blended families. But I seem to remember the mistress of the house in "Eight is Enough" looking out a window with depressive tears in her eyes and Willie Aames looking pensive...

I would contend that "The Marriage Plot" is a heavy "St. Elmo's Fire." Both deal with post-graduate life in the early 1980's, a time that I now often view with rosy-glassed nostalgia, as it is "my era." St. Elmo's Fire, the movie, attempted to touch on the serious--cocaine addiction, betrayal in the midst of young love, the disillusionment of being a social worker, but it was mostly a showcase for the hot brat pack actors and actresses.

At first, and after reading some of the online reviews (full confession: I have not yet read "Middlesex") I felt this was another "St. Elmo's Fire"--rather one-dimensional characters whining about youth, and making the usual mistakes. Plus there's the fact that they are all rather well-to-do Ivy League students (here, at Brown)that makes them all somewhat annoying.

But somewhere along the way, I got really caught up in this story. Maybe it's my age--I am approaching the point at which I might be any of their mothers. I was hooked. Would Madeline really become a Victorian studies scholar? Would Leonard find a way out of the awful grip of his bipolar illness? Would Mitchell figure out what to do with his interest in religion? Although supposedly according to reviews, Mitchell's interest in religion has to do with the sublimation of his love for Madeline, I found it a refreshingly open-minded trip view of a young mind reading about Christianity for the first time.

This book has much less to do with marriage, and much more to do with being in your 20's. And for those of us of a certain age, it's filled with nostalgic bits--waiting at home for phone calls on your landline, typing on a manual typewriter, and a time when women didn't attend Columbia U., and not so many years removed from a time when women went to college to learn to talk to their husbands about intellectual subjects (I kid you not. I'm paraphrasing from a college catalog here.)

If you have some time, give it a try. I'm off to tackle "Middlesex."