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

Not interesting at all.

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

English majors

What could Jeffrey Eugenides have done to make this a more enjoyable book for you?

I think I would have enjoyed it more if the book had centered around the title of the book. Instead, I felt pummeled with odd factoids and trivia.

Would you be willing to try another one of David Pittu’s performances?

No. I found it very monotone. Not my favorite narration style.

Franzen/DFW wannabe

Loved Eugenides' other books, but "The Marriage Plot" felt like a bad knockoff of Franzen's "Freedom" (re: college love triangle). And on the subject of ripping off better writers, Eugenides bases one of his lead characters on David Foster Wallace. Leonard is a super-smart bandana-wearing tobacco-chewing bipolar prodigy. I don't know if Eugenides intended this as homage or what, but it felt cheap and obvious.

Disappointing

Open to new authors, I purchased this based on the reviews...big mistake. Very difficult to get into, stay into and ended somewhat abruptly. Found it to be very disconnected with characters unevenly developed and what seemed to be little or weak plot. But this is a rare dud among many gems from audible. Recommend to spend one tokens elsewhere.

I really *wanted* to like this...

I loved "Middlesex." In fact, I think it's the best audiobook I've ever "read." I really, really wanted to like Eugenides' new book.

I didn't.

The story seemed interesting, but nothing really _happens_. The first part of the book, where the author discusses the literary crazes of the 1980s was above my head, and I'm fairly well educated. I just don't care about "Of Grammatology" (or maybe I'm just not that smart ;)).

The characters were unlikeable and the story was boring. I kept waiting for something to happen but nothing ever did.

If you're happy, this book can change that

A story of disfunctional people making one another, and the reader, unhappy. That is about it.

I started, stoped and started again. Not Sure.

What would have made The Marriage Plot better?

Less name dropping of literary references, authors and novels. If I were into that sort of thing, I would be more likely be listening to a different caliber of novel.

Would you ever listen to anything by Jeffrey Eugenides again?

Not without a personal recommendation from a close friend.

What does David Pittu bring to the story that you wouldn???t experience if you just read the book?

His narration was good, and it added more life and dimension to the characters.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Disappointment. The ending snuck up on me. It was hard to believe they wrapped it all up so quickly. As if the author just got sick of writing and needed to end it.

Any additional comments?

I started and stopped and started again a lot with this book. If I had something more interesting downloaded, I may not have finished. There were points where the story would get going and it did keep my interest and I wanted to hear more, but there were several points particularly at the beginning that I felt bogged down by the literary references.

The description of the manic depressant character was interesting, and for that alone I am glad to have gotten through the book to get an inside glimpse into what that may be like for someone who suffers in this way, although because of the time period I am wondering if the medications today are better. Maybe Jodi Picoult could pick up the subject in one of her novels!

This is a plot to bore you

It's book was such a disappointment. I stuck with it all the way through, thinking that surely, the author of "Middlesex" would pull through with a compelling and fascinating tale. Not so. The Marriage Plot is overwritten, and goes into far too much detail on stories that don't advance the plot. Eugenides did not create characters that you care about. When the book is finished you wish you could get those hours of your life back.

Given Up on Eugenides

I have tried Eugenides several times since first reading Middlesex. I absolutely loved that book. Since then, however, I have tried and failed to gain the same sense of excitement on his other writings. I have tried Virgin Suicides and this title. I could not get hooked. It is rare that I do not finish a book, but this one was. The narration was okay but the characters just never grabbed my attention. I will not waste any more credits on Eugenides.

Boring could only make it halfway

I found the plot very boring, and the writing nothing special. I only made it through most of the first half, and those 5-6 hrs were spent describing one female character and the series of loser boyfriends she had while at Brown university studying literature. The ONLY action was her parents visiting and eating bagels with her in a café on graduation day, and a party at which she sleeps with a classmate.

I guess this is one of those books that is mainly about describing characters and a time/place (the hipster literary/philosophy scene at Brown in the 80s is vaguely interesting), which some people might like. But the main character and writing style are not interesting enough in my opinion to support this type of drawn-out character study, and the plot really doesn’t seem to be going anywhere-- or if it is, it’s at a snail’s pace.

I read the Virgin Suicides many years ago and enjoyed it, but either my tastes in literature have changed or his writing has. It just felt very basic and elemental with nothing impressive.

The narrator is good-- not the best I’ve heard but certainly listenable.

Surprisingly irritating

Eugenides's condescension towards his characters was only topped by Pittu's voicing of them. Sorry, but I was disappointed in the book, the first I've read by Eugenides. I admit that I stayed till the end---I was interested in what happened to the characters and I was also interested in the milieu (I didn't go to college in the 80's, but I think that the experience of searching for meaning/career/independence is a common one). Another reviewer wrote that Pittu's voices for women was "gay," whatever that means. I found that his voices for both men and women made them seem self-centered and clueless---and his voices for women made them seem even stupider than perhaps Eugenides intended. I can't think of one character in the book who wasn't dense, although I suppose that Mitchell, although pretty pathetic and cluless, at least seemed decent. Madeleine's parents were complete buffoons----like many of his portrayals, this was spelled out in the most obvious way.