The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides

A few pages in and a main character throws a Rolando Barthes book, A Lover's Discourse. So it's going to be one of those kind of books, is it?  Three characters, in university in the early 80's, fall in love, talk about religion, literary criticism, yeast cultures and truth.  Mitchell (Young Tom Waits as he is referenced) is searching for meaning in religion. Leonard, manic depressive, is searching for truth in science. Madeline is the girl they both fall in love with, who doesn't quite get the new literary criticism and prefers Victorian novels.

She picks Leonard. Mitchell goes off to see the world, and after a negative experience at Mother Theresa's hospital in Calcutta, he comes back to the U.S. to find that Madeline has married Leonard.  Leonard, however, is a manic depressive who can't get his meds right, and as the story unfolds, Madeline was more in love with the idea of being in love with Leonard than actually being in love with him. She could blame Barthes, or she could blame all the Austen she read.

There is some wit in this realistic prose, but the novel feels like an experiment - can an old fashioned love story be written for these modern (or near-modern) times? Nobody seemed to ask why this should be a topic to explore, but the author puts together a readable novel, even if it's hard to find an emotional connection to these characters.  There's something for everyone - you can read it as a straight ahead romance novel, or you can hold it under the light of your weary, post-post-post-modern microscope and dissect it.

One aspect was particularly distracting - the author seems to be paying homage to David Foster Wallace in the character of Leonard. He's smart, large, wears a bandanna and chews tobacco, majoring in philosophy. DFW was a depressive and not a manic depressive, and Leonard isn't a writer, but the similarities are too close to be coincidentally. Eugenides has denied this, which makes it even more distracting - surely an editor or a first reader must have pointed this out, even if it wasn't intentional.