Book review: The Marriage Plot

IN HIS first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), Jeffrey Eugenides told the macabre story of the deaths of five teenage sisters and the “soft decay” of a suburban American family.

Middlesex (2002), his follow-up, recounted the life of Cal, a hermaphrodite, who lives until puberty as a girl until s/he realises she might be a boy. From broadly the same generation of US writers as Douglas Coupland, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody and the late David Foster Wallace, Eugenides shares some of their concerns – among them a preoccupation with chronicling the texture of “ordinary” (read dysfunctional) American life – yet he shows a unique ability to tackle potentially difficult subjects.

The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex owed much of their originality to their refusal to adopt a conventional stance or tone towards their themes. Both books were driven by a strong initial idea, and made the most of it.

Can the same be said of The Marriage Plot, Eugenides’ third novel? Not really. Its organising idea is to offer a 21st-century take on the classic nuptial narratives of Jane Austen, George Eliot and so many others, with a self-conscious, post-postmodernist spin. It opens as a campus novel set in 1982, following three American students (Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell) around the year of their graduation, who form a love triangle (Madeleine loves Leonard; Mitchell loves Madeleine). After beginning as a snappy comedy, however, the novel soon mutates into something rather more formless, gloomy and interesting. The easy satire stops off campus as Leonard is hospitalised with manic depression, and Mitchell goes to India on a pseudo-religious quest. The pharmaceutical exaltation of the depressive runs parallel to the spiritual exaltation of the young pilgrim, and the novel moves into surprising, wild zones.

The Marriage Plot lacks the distinctiveness of Eugenides’ earlier books. The ‘plot’ itself is its flimsiest suit, though it remains highly enjoyable.

Its main success is the extended depiction of the three figures on the cusp of adulthood, grappling with the wider world, and the oddly stressful weightlessness before life hardens and takes shape.

• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. 4th Estate, 416pp, £20