The Marriage Plot

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides is about me. It's like he took the story of my life, added some more interesting parts, set it back in time and published it. As such, reading this book was a deeply personal experience.

The book follows me... I mean Madeleine (which is just one of the many superbly awesome names in the book) as she graduates from Brown in 1982 with a degree in English, hoping to go to grad school to further study 18th Century-literature. Her sometimes-friend Mitchell Grammaticus (seriously, how awesome is that name!) is a graduating religious studies major who is going to travel the world and hopefully not return until the recession is over. Madeleine's boyfriend Leonard Bankhead (probably the most accurate name, and I mean, really.) is supposed to graduate, but a hypomanic state lands him in the hospital after he missed enough classes to be forcibly dropped.

Speaking of mania, a major plot point in the book is Leonard's manic-depression (or, what is now called Bi-Polar disorder). Yet another example of Eugenides' bizarre ability to know my life. His portrayal of BP disorder is real and not such a big deal. Leonard is a superior asshole, but he was an asshole while he was on Lithium he was an asshole when he decided to stop Lithium, he was an asshole when not on Lithium, and guess what, he's an asshole on a different dose of Lithium. Not such a large character arc, but I'll get back to that in a minute.

While the story jumps from character to character a la Beloved, only it's clearer who is actually talking, the center focus is definitely Madeleine. Her struggles while living with Leonard and still trying to get into grad school after doing poorly on the GRE. The two men in the story are completely absorbed in Madeleine, trying to get her, keep her, please her and fuck her. In this way, The Marriage Plot is very similar to Eugenides's other works, especially The Virgin Suicides. Madeleine is placed on a pedestal by the two main men in her life, one that is not necessarily deserved and is hard for her to live up to. Both Leonard and Mitchell paint her as the perfect woman, loving and unselfish, but Madeleine knows that is not always the case.

The story continues on in this fashion, getting Madeleine's point of view of certain events, followed by Leonard's of the same event and Mitchell's experiences overseas. One thing all the stories have in common is the constant thought of Madeleine and Leonard.

Being ever the Eugenides book, no one is perfect. All of the actions are very real, making the book an exceptional experience of the brilliantly mundane. Sure, there are no sword fights or huge declarations of undying love, but there are seemingly real people living out the fictionally real lives to the best of their ability.

In the beginning of the book, I was rooting for Madeleine and Leonard to make the leap and become the couple for life, but then Leonard's asshole-ness made it perfectly clear that he and Madeleine, or he and any person, really, could and should not be together. He uses her throughout the book and never takes any responsibility. It's either the meds' fault he couldn't get it up, or it's his parents' fault for passing on their complete disfunction. But he never takes a step back and realizes that while being Bi-Polar wholly and truly sucks, it is not a reason to treat the person who loves you enough to almost wipe your ass for you like shit. Once it became abundantly clear that Leonard was not going to change his ways, and that Madeleine would never actually leave him, I began looking forward to Mitchell's sections.

I'm not going to give too much more of the plot, I'm just going to say that Mitchell and Madeleine do end up being together, but the book doesn't end with them together. No one is really happy at the end, except possibly Madeleine. She is living in New York, going to grad school at Columbia and finally on her own. And that's it, that's the whole end to the book.

I really enjoyed reading this book but Eugenides's style is one that is so subdued that it can sometimes be very hard to pay attention. His characters make the book. They are all so real that the book could have easily been a biography. That's what Eugenides does best, put real characters into real situations and make it interesting. He focuses on real life and sometimes that's enough.