The Marriage Plot

By: Jeffrey Eugenides

Narrated by: David Pittu

Length: 15 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

A New York Times Notable Book of 2011

A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011

A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title

One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011

A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title

One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011

It's the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus—who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it unfolds like the intimate journal of our own lives.

©2011 Jeffrey Eugenides (P)2011 Macmillan Audio

Critic reviews

“The sound of silk drawn across fine-grain sandpaper best describes David Pittu's voice in THE MARRIAGE PLOT, by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides...The talented Pittu rises to the occasion of this challenging work, rewarding the listener with a sense of satisfaction reserved for great works of literature.”—AudioFile magazine, An Earphones Award Winner

“David Pittu brilliantly narrates this audio version of Eugenides' complex novel, whether he's rattling off quotes from Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes or creating unique voices for the book's many characters. Among the standouts are his renditions of the slow and reflective Mitchell and Thurston, the star of the semiotics seminar who speaks in a falsely laconic and disinterested fashion to impress his classmates and professor… [Pittu] never runs out of voices for this large, global cast. The result is one of the best audiobooks of the year.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“No one's more adept at channeling teenage angst than Jeffrey Eugenides. Not even J. D. Salinger . . . It's in mapping Mitchell's search for some sort of belief that might fill the spiritual hole in his heart and Madeleine's search for a way to turn her passion for literature into a vocation that this novel is at its most affecting, reminding us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love and in love with books and ideas.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“This is a story about being young and bright and lost, a story Americans have been telling since Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Our exceptionally well-read but largely untested graduates still wonder: How should I live my life? What can I really believe in? Whom should I love? Literature has provided a wide range of answers to those questions—Lose Lady Brett! Give up on Daisy! Go with Team Edward!—but in the end, novels aren't really very good guidebooks. Instead, they're a chance to exercise our moral imagination, and this one provides an exceptionally witty and poignant workout.”—Ron Charles, The Washington Post

Boring. Gave Up After 105 Chapters

If you like overly long novels with dozens of unlikable characters who make brief appearances and then never return, with no real story progression but plenty of misogynistic overtones, this book is for you. I am on Chapter 105 with nearly 5 hours still left in the book and realized I love myself too much to waste any more time on it. I really did give it a try, because Eugenides is a celebrated author and I love David Pittu's narration, but nothing has happened after 105 chapters, except some deeply weird portrayals of the female characters and anthropomorphic takes on the female anatomy. Do I really need the backstory of minor characters like the woman in rehab with Leonard? No I do not. Did I need to read that Madeleine's breasts "had withdrawn into themselves, as if depressed"? Absolutely not. Is it strange that he writes "Claire's ass didn't necessarily agree with its owner's feminist politics"? Yes, it is. Dude, get some therapy.

David Pittu nails the characters

The narrator makes or breaks listening to a novel, for me. The story takes you back to the early eighties, northeast college towns, with I impeccably researched location detail, and with a sort of a compassionate satire of the time. Pittu’s timing is perfect, and his female characters- as a female from the generation depicted - don’t bother me a bit. I loved it.

Great writing, esoteric subject, narrator hit/miss

I haven't finished the book but feel compelled to review and figure an early review is better than no review.

If you know Brown U, RISD, PVD, College Hill, or 1980s academia you'll get swept up and relive the details you thought you'd forgotten. Interesting that Eugenides again plays with gender by narrating from a women's perspective (and does it well). Eugenides' description of the Brown Semiotics course is spot on and hilarious. The narrator does a fine job for an audio book though the usual annoyance of reading in a female voice is disappointing (his Phyllippa character sounds more like a stereotypical gay voice than a woman's). What is much more distracting though is his mispronunciation of things like apartheid or Buddy Cianci or Che Guevara. All three of those words/names are rooted in the 1980s or Providence, so perhaps this just reveals the narrator's youth?

Finally, I'm finding that this is a book, partly because of Eugenides' writing style, that benefits from reading along to the audio. There's a lot of nuance to be caught and names like Phylippa and Barthes and Eco got lost with just the audio.

Some parts shine, overall dissappointing

There are short parts in this novel that one revisits the beaty in the writing and character illumination of the authors previous (masterpiece)- Middlesex. However the novel in total in my opinion could have used significant pruning and the story was of limited interest.

Downer

What did you like best about The Marriage Plot? What did you like least?

I liked the narration and the writing style, as well as the various concurrent plots. Unfortunately, the main plot is really a downer. At times I dreaded getting in my car and listening to another segment.

Would you recommend The Marriage Plot to your friends? Why or why not?

I wouldn't recommend this to friends, only because it's too depressing.

Did The Marriage Plot inspire you to do anything?

This book inspired me to be grateful for my mental health!

Boring and Trite

(also posted on Amazon.com)

I intended to love this book, having waited for it since Middlesex. I am disappointed. I felt like I was reading Franzen's Corrections, which was okay, but I didn't need to read it again; nor did I finish Freedom by Franzen for the same reason. I am disappointed because I had put great stock in JE, and I was sure this next book, so long in coming would be a masterpiece.

What has happened to popular literature? Why is it sufficient to trot out the lives of characters, their intersections and their problems, without the framework of plot -- there is no "desire" here. There is no conflict, and there is no passion.

I am always glad to learn new things. So after the MP I know some little something about yeast cells. I know a little more about manic/depression and I know some things about India which I might not have come to otherwise know.

The parents in this story were cut from the same dough as many others. In this book, and those like it, 20somethings from the 1980s (who would be 50 somethings now) are vapid but brilliant, healthy but unable to follow their own common sense, and they aren't even having a great time with sex. Sex is so tortuous in this book, that it frequently reads like the Indian excrement scene, embarrassing and tragic.

I suppose, as one reviewer put it, if I were of that class, I could identify with it better. I am much older than those characters were in this telling, but I don't lack my own memories from my 20s. We had **fun**. We suffered deeply, we played hard, we felt things, we regretted, we rejoiced. These people don't even get a kick from their privileged education and the exposure to the subjects they chose to study.

Poor Mitchell couldn't measure up to his own standards for being "good." Leo's situation is hopeless. I've known some M/Ds in my life. They function most of the time, they hold jobs and have families, go to school and prevail much of the time -- especially those with two shrinks and constant medication monitoring. This boy, Leonard, was hung out to dry. Maddy took on his illness and became a depressive too. There was nothing to root for in any of them.

So, I am disappointed on many levels. I expected more from the writer of Middlesex. I expected more from the parade of characters, not all of whom were cardboard cut-outs, and I expected some kind of mystery or journey or decision to be made by the hero -- but frankly, I am not sure who the hero/protagonist was.

The point of view changes were very effective, because not one of those characters could have supported the whole book. I was looking for a transition, a convergence of the three into one (metaphorically), but none came.

Maddy gets out of her situation with Leonard. Mitchell must accept her passive rejection and Leo is out running in the woods. While this may represent reality, who gives a s**t?

Depressing!

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

As a rule I am drawn to characters with mental illnesses, but Leonard was just depressing. He was a one dimensional pretentious snob. It seemed like Eugenides googled "manic depression" then wrote a character based on everything he read about mania and depression. Even Leonard's certainty that he was smarter than his doctors and his attempt to take himself off his meds seemed cliche. I think the only thing in this book that was worse than Leonard's character was Maddy, who for some unknown reason fell in love with him even though he wasn't all that nice to her. I was actually pretty offended by the character of Maddy, who hardly seemed like a modern, educated woman. Rather, she seemed like the kind of woman who just goes to school to get the MRS degree. Mitchell, who was the only marginally likeable character in the novel, could have done much better.

Has The Marriage Plot turned you off from other books in this genre?

I'm not even sure what genre this book was. Lady Gaga probably said it best....bad romance.

If this book were a movie would you go see it?

I would probably go see it in the hope that the movie would actually be better than the book and that this depressing story could somehow be redeemed.

A disappointment

I graduated from Brown in 1981, one year ahead of the author and the setting of the opening of this novel, so I was excited by the opening chapter, a faithful reenactment of graduation weekend and all the attendant ceremonies, family embarrasments and farewells. Everything is perfect, down to the Talking Heads lyrics and local diners. But as the novel wore on, I became less and less engaged by/with the characters, as their lives moved so slowly forward and backward, a tiresome trio, destined to hurt and pillage each other through their early middle ages. The narrator of the audible version wasn't enough to keep me going. Maybe the marriage plot is too much to carry off after all.

Passable, but not even close to Middlesex

I was very excited to read the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. "Middlesex" was a revelation to me, a masterpiece I still return to as my top five book recommendations when asked by friends.

Well, this is a very well-written novel with three very distinct characters. You have fun looking at events from their perspectives. Eugenides manages to find and express their three unique voices.

But at the end of the novel an annoying question "So What?" kept lingering in my mind. I was not sure what was the point of tracing three different points of view, creating three different voices. It was an exquisite, high-quality literary exercise you submit to a professor in "Advanced novel writting" class. I've expected more from a master of insights Eugenides. Maybe my expectation was just too high.

You will enjoy the process, but will not be enriched in any way at the end.

PS Pittu narration was masterful given he had to express three very different characters.

I guess College in the 80's is just not my read.

What did you like best about The Marriage Plot? What did you like least?

I liked the realism of the characters. I disliked the unnecessarily large amount of "College English Major" trivia.

Would you recommend The Marriage Plot to your friends? Why or why not?

No - unless they had a special interest in College in the 80's.

How could the performance have been better?

Too much gender emphasis in the reading of the dialogue.