The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (Fourth Estate, 2011)

“Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken”

Nine years on from the excellent Pulitzer prize winning Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides’ third novel has the look and feel of a substantial work.

In it, his stated aim is to attempt a big contemporary novel on the classic themes of love and marriage of the type found in celebrated novels of authors like Jane Austen and George Eliot.

Needless to say, he is mindful of the radical changes in society since the Victorian Age and the fact that the attitudes and roles of women are very different. Nowadays, prenuptual agreements and quickie divorces mean that marriage is no longer the be all and end all for women. Elevated social status and liberation is not dependent on making the right love match.

As a concept, the novel holds much promise but Eugenides seems weighed down by the burden of these themes. It all boils down three extended character studies – two men and one woman – and how their lives interweave. “Does the body rule the mind or does the mind rule the body?” asked Morrissey in The Smiths’ Still Ill and this is one of the question implicitly posed by all three.

Madeleine Hanna has the heavy responsibility of being the sole heroine. She is neither particularly complex or feisty and for this novel to work she should have been one or the other. At the time of her graduation (in 1982) she is described as a “positive, privileged, sheltered, exemplary person” who makes a point of avoiding unstable people. As a bookworm, you feel that the bulk of her passion is reserved for a fictional ideal and she feels safer reading about love in 19th century novels or in Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse – “a repair manual for the heart”.

As a starting point, this is fine but she doesn’t substantially change as the novel progresses and when faced with two potential suitors she is frustratingly passive and irritatingly unworldly.

She falls in lust with the less than stable Leonard Bankhead to become another of a steady stream of women whose heads are turned by his intellectual brilliance, anti-conformism and assertive sexuality. Eugenides writes: “A representative image of Leonard’s freshman year would be of a guy lifting his head from an act of cunnilingus long enough to take a bong hit and give a correct answer in class”.   While her peers enjoy brief flings with him, Madeleine seeks more and the relationship becomes more serious when his manic depression brings out her maternal instincts. Not surprisingly it all ends in tears.

The third strand of the story is that of Mitchell Grammaticus who, in contrast to Leonard’s charistmatic physicality, is more introspective and sees life as a spiritual journey. He singles out Madeleine as an ideal marital partner but has to settle for platonic friendship. Instead of pursuing her he decides to travel to Europe and India which finds him stalking Mother Teresa in the hospices in Calcutta.

As both these men are far more driven than Madeleine they become the focal points and any possible feminist messages get squeezed to the sidelines. On the basis of this novel, the classic marriage plots of yesteryear are resistant to a post-modern makeover.