The Marriage Plot

The Marriage Plot is a wonderfully sophisticated novel about the pursuit of ideas, the pursuit of dreams, and the pursuit of true love. This novel is written by Jeffrey Eugenides, the author of Middlesex (which I had purchased somewhere near the middle of The Marriage Plot). This novel starts out with its three main characters still in college albeit just barely. They are all (so we think at first) about to graduate from Brown University. I had assumed that Madeleine, our only female main character, was the star of the book but it seems that the book is not about one singular person but more about "the marriage plot" in the 1980s. We also have Mitchell - the religious studies major - and Leonard ... the "wrong" guy who Madeleine is deeply in love with. 

The cover is pliable and I love holding it in my hands and feeling it with my fingers. The book has no chapters. Instead things are separated into parts. It does not say that there are parts however there will be a blank page with a bold title written on it and then the next section in this 1980s "marriage plot" begins.

Part One: A Madman in Love. The Marriage Plot reminds me of what it was like to be in college. The pompous students who drop the names of theorists like bombs to sound intellectual and impressive ... the ones who loudly proclaim their love and devotion for the chosen theorist of the hour, the know-it-all's, the party-goers, the studious ones determined to make Latin Honors. In college we all probably had the experimental professor who never really said or did anything and instead left the class up to the students whilst he sat in the window and nodded occasionally. The hipsters, the fear of speaking out loud in class (unless of course you had something incredibly profound or meaningful to say), the reserved judgment of those who spoke too often, the stress of what to do after graduation. Here we meet Madeleine ... "She'd become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read." We discover that Madeleine's love for books is much like my own ... she becomes immersed in books. Running her fingers over their pages and "salt-spotted covers, She peeled apart pages made tacky by ocean air. She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine's heart." She is the type of girl to ignore the festivities going on in order to read for a while and "make the sad old book feel better." Madeleine loves books.

"And yet sometimes she worried about what those musty old books were doing to her. Some people mahored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program ... a child of academics, was planning on getting a Pg.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default... English was what people who didn't know what to major in majored in." Madeleine is a confused girl, blinded by what she believes to be love and uncertain of her future. Madeleine is indeed like me in some ways, which I think is why I connected to this novel so quickly, but on the other hand her book list seems more sophisticated than mine - many of the classics, many from the Victorian age, and quite a few that seem obscure to me. 

This novel takes place in the 1980s - a decade close to my "era" which would be the 1990s to the 2000s. Funny how I was born in 1989 and yet this decade is seemingly too far away or mysterious for me to imagine and connect to. I don't get the pop culture references or the politics. I've never had an interest in the 1980s and therefore this time period is challenging for me to comprehend. 

Our story starts with a hungover depiction of Madeleine on the morning of graduation day. Here is our soon-to-be college graduate of Brown with no job, no place to live, and no boyfriend. Her parents are irritating her hangover by showing up at her apartment. They annoy her and this is obvious. The novel just became instantly engaging. We are sucked into her life ... or rather we consume her life like a vacuum consuming cookie crumbs hoping to put them all together to realize the whole. 

Madeleine's life is falling apart at the beginning. Having recently broken up with Leonard she is facing the gloom and doom of breakups and singledom and this is clouding not only her judgment but her hopes for the future. The problem at this time is that love isn't living up to its standards. Madeleine takes us back to a seminar she took where she decided to make her senior honors thesis about "the marriage plot." The marriage plot has disappeared in novels nowadays because culturally it is not relevant anymore. 

Example: "In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer's marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn't had to read historical fiction. You had to read non-Western novels ... You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time." And so Madeleine is obsessed with the demise of the marriage plot and the emergence of feminism (in a nutshell). The disintegration of marriage led to the disintegration of the novel. Novels have now had to become something else entirely. 

Soon we shift into Mitchell's perspective. Madeleine is the girl he wants to marry. He knows this and he believes in it. The only problem with this is that Madeleine is still in love with her ex-boyfriend, Leonard. "Madeleine allowed herself once again to wish the forbidden wish of getting back together with Leonard. It seemed to her that if she could just have that one thing, all her other problems would bearable." Do you sense a familiar plot coming on? Girl loves the wrong guy, the right guy is right there all along, but will she have the strength to chose the right one??? Or more importantly ... does a woman need a man romantically to feel fulfilled? Will the man recognize this? 

So part one is entitled A Madman in Love, but for us it is hard to know who the title is referring to. Love is intense.

Pilgirms starts with Mitchell and his friend Larry in Paris on the start of their 8-9 month trip abroad. Claire, Larry's girlfriend, is offering up a place for them to stay but Mitchell quickly realizes that his personality clashes with Claire's fierce feminist one. Mitchell leaves Claire's apartment eventually to leave the two lovebirds some space, but he is more than anything enthralled with the picturesque disrepair of Paris. "It took courage to let things fall apart so beautifully." A quote that can be applied to many situations. Here some themes start to really take flight - religion, sexism, misogyny, feminism, literature, etc. Also Mitchell struggles not only to find an ideal religious experience but he also struggles with being an American abroad. Madeleine (on the other side of the world) is struggling with feminism as well but in a different way as she examines the Victorian age. Issues of gender equality sprout up in both of their lives. As Mitchell fights with Claire-the-Feminist in Paris (she gets particularly cheesed when he's caught reading Hemingway), Madeleine is back together with the manic-depressive Leonard (oh right, he's mentally ill ... forgot to mention that) and her mother and sister have come for a visit. Madeleine is charged with the task of convincing her sister to go back to her husband and baby (whom she's left). Maddy's sister responds with "If you want a career my advice is don't get married. You think things have changed and there's some kind of gender equality now, that men are different, but I've got new for you. They're not. They're just as shitty and selfish as Daddy was. Is." 

As Mitchell and Larry finally leave Paris, Mitchell's preoccupation with religion becomes even more pronounced. In Greece Mitchell is accosted by a religious Christian who bombards him with questions about why is he in Greece and "Are you a Christian?" Something to be clear about is that religion in this novel plays a huge part particularly in Mitchell's life. At one point he considers going to divinity school to become a theologian. However, Mitchell's views on religion itself are clear ... "The worst thing about religion was religious people." Mitchell is searching for peace and looking for something. And this something is undefined but he assumes it's something spiritual. Abroad he hopes to find this something as he simultaneously wishes to push Madeleine (and her renewed relationship with Leonard) far away. At the end of Pilgrims we have Mitchell heading off to India, leaving his now gay friend Larry behind in Athens with his new lover, and Mitchell has been handed a break up letter from a girl he never had to begin with. 

Brilliant Move. In Part 3 we hear from Leonard's perspective for the first time. We see his past history and the spiraling progression of his manic-depression. We see the class differences between him and Madeleine. He feels inadequate as he was brought up smoking weed and she was brought up with tennis lessons and a desire to watch Wimbledon tournaments in the mornings. We see more specifically what it was like for him to be in the hospital for mental illness and his feeling as if he was being interrogated for a crime. We understand how doped up he feels and relish his honesty as he describes suicidal people being brilliant tacticians. The author's tone in this section (Jeffrey Eugenides) hints at an aversion to religion which is an interesting comparison to Mitchell's religious search. At one point Leonard refers to a religious woman in group therapy as "surprising" him by not being a typical Christian. He believes most Christians are of less than favorable character traits ... namely being judgmental. "It didn't surprise Leonard that Darlene was religious. People without hope often were. But Darlene didn't seem weak, credulous, or stupid ... she seemed remarkably rational, intelligent, and nonjudgmental." We also hear at this point that to believe in God is not something Leonard is capable of doing. We also see that the only time Leonard and Mitchell have met one another was in fact in the only religious studies course that Leonard had ever taken. Leonard's brilliant move in this part is something that is a reflection of his illness. A desparate move that has not been well thought out at all.

Asleep in the Lord. Mitchell is in Calcutta. Calcutta now feels real to him because he is there for a purpose. "The best he could say about his travels so far was that they described the route of a pilgrimage that had led him to his present location." Mitchell now volunteers at a place he describes where old men go to die ... a hospital run by Mother Teresa. Mitchell is still searching for that something ... that religious experience that will make everything make sense for him. "If Mitchell was ever going to become a good Christian, he would have to stop disliking people so intensely." Mitchell is still struggling with his journey and has an aversion to the sick men he is supposed to care for. The close to God that he gets the more aware of himself he is. He feels inadequate and has frequent desires to leave the muck, poverty, and illness that is Calcutta. It is in India, however, that Mitchell finds his something ... he has a revelation about Madeleine. 

**Spoiler Alert ... kind of:

And Sometimes They Were Very Sad. Madeleine is struggling to feel existential. She is married now to a manic-depression. Yes ... she and Leonard get married **that's kind of a spoiler but not really. Mitchell felt an urge in India to warn Madeleine against this decision that he anticipated her making, but his warning failed to reach her. He couldn't save her from her inevitable sadness. 

The Bachelorette's Survival Kit. It is here that the "marriage plot" is rewritten. Here is an ending that will defy your expectations. 

I fell in love with these characters. Well I kind of fell in love with them. I sort of hated Leonard but then I had examine my own attitude toward mental illness and I felt a little chastened by my analysis. I went on my own pilgrimage throughout this novel ... remembering college, my break-ups, my true-loves, my quest for that certain something - that something that was more than anything I had dreamed of - that something to make you feel complete. Here is a novel that gave me a plot that satisfied my feminist ideals, that challenged my feminist ideals, that puzzled me and kept me thinking for hours afterward ... it gave me the realities of relationships, the soothing nature of religion (and the frustrating contradictory nature of religion), and it filled the hole in my heart that can only be filled by traveling and reading. It took me places. It gave me an ending where the right thing happened and a true love story was born - a love story of hope, sacrifice, and comfort. This novel also proves that what you think you know in college is nothing compared to the lessons you learn in real life. I cannot urge you to read this book enough. I wish someone else had read it with me so I would have someone to talk to about it. It's complex and yet simple all at the same time. And its ending warmed my heart.


*** Update: I don't think I've mentioned this already but while reading this novel I thought it reminded me of the novel Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I have never read the novel but I have seen the movie. My friends in college who did read the book told me that it was good although the religious section of the memoir got a little long and boring. Either way it's a woman's memoir about finding yourself and figuring out how parts of your life can fit together to make you who you are - which I believe is what Mitchell did in The Marriage Plot. He needed to graduate college, travel, pray, and find love - and once he finds love he has to figure out what to do with it. So if you read The Marriage Plot, pick up Eat, Pray, Love and tell me what  you think. If you like this you might also like The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty. I've also got Jeffrey Eugenides's book Middlesex on my bookshelf now waiting to be read ... although Scott neglected to tell me we already owned it! Hidden away on our other bookshelf. Oh well ... anyone want a copy of it?

This is NOT mine ... but I thought it good to include another person's perspective on the novel. I also LOVE this evaluation sheet and might introduce it to my fifth graders.