The Marriage Plot: Not Eugenides at His Best

It's a coincidence but I finished reading Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot two days before our 50th anniversary.  The heroine Madeleine Hanna is an English major, much taken by Victorian novels, who eventually heads for an academic career where the marriage plot beloved of 19th century writers will be a pillar of her scholarship.

She has two suitors, Leonard Bankhead, certifiably crazy and possibly a brillliant biologist, and Mitchell Grammaticus, far more sane,  but mad for Madeleine and searching for truth and--possibly--God. She's not exactly an heiress, but money is not problem for her, yet she's at an age when she should get married to somebody suitable.

Put that way, the situation sounds like an updating of something by George Eliot.  The amount of pre-marital sex might upset Victorian readers, although it's clear that a lot of hanky panky went on 150 years ago, as Eliot's 20 year adulterous relationship with George Henry Lewe attests.  Mitchell's spiritual quest, Madeleine's match-making mother, and Madeleine's disatisfaction  with the life she seems headed for would all be familiar to 19th century readers, however.

Eugenides pulls a couple of surprises at the end of the book, which show off his erudition and kick his story into the end of the 20th century.  It also is a fast and fascinating read: I sat up late one night to finish it.  But the book is not as good as his earlier work, particularly Middlesex.  There  he also played with literary form--he said he tried to follow the history of literature in the style he wrote each section--and the novelty of his hermaphrodite main character created a dynanism not found in his new book.

Fifty years ago just before our wedding I read Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure
and Bette Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, both of which give a very negative view of marriage and the possiblity of a good relation between men and women. That I went ahead, and married Lee anyway says something about my hopes for what we could build together. The fact that we're still at it all these years later says even more about what we've been able to do.