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Summary
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 reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
Author Notes
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan on March 8, 1960. He received a B.A. from Brown University and an M.A. in English and creative writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to in 1993 and was made into a feature film. His other works include Middlesex, which won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and The Marriage Plot. He is a professor of creative writing at Princeton University.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In Eugenides's perceptive new novel set in the early 1980s, the three sides of a love triangle-Brown University undergraduates Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell-come of age in a complicated and heady environment of semiotics, religious mysticism, sexual freedom, and economic recession. After graduation, the three are forced to confront their relationships, secrets, and desires as they attempt to find their way in the real world. David Pittu brilliantly narrates this audio version of Eugenides's 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. And while Pittu's rendition of Madeline is too soft and flat, he never runs out of voices for this large, global cast. The result is one of the best audiobooks of the year. A Farrar, Straus and Giroux hardcover. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A stunning novelerudite, compassionate and penetrating in its analysis of love relationships.Eugenides focuses primarily on three characters, who all graduate from Brown in 1982. One of the pieces of this triangle is Madeleine Hanna, who finds herself somewhat embarrassed to have emerged from a "normal" household in New Jersey (though we later find out the normality of her upbringing is only relative). She becomes enamored with Leonard, a brilliant but moody student, in their Semiotics course, one of the texts being, ironically, Roland Barthes'A Lover's Discourse, which Madeleine finds disturbingly problematic in helping her figure out her own love relationship. We discover that Leonard had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder during his first year at Brown, and his struggle with mood swings throughout the novel is both titanic and tender. The third major player is Mitchell, a Religious Studies major who is also attracted to Madeleine but whose reticence she finds both disturbing and incomprehensible. On graduation day, Leonard has a breakdown and is hospitalized in a mental-health ward, and Madeleine shows her commitment by skipping the festivities and seeking him out. After graduation, Leonard and Madeleine live together when Leonard gets an internship at a biology lab on Cape Cod, and the spring after graduation they marry, when Leonard is able to get his mood swings under temporary control. Meanwhile Mitchell, who takes his major seriously, travels to India seeking a pathand briefly finds one when he volunteers to work with the dying in Calcutta. But Mitchell's road to self-discovery eventually returns him to the Statesand opens another opportunity for love that complicates Madeleine's life.Dazzling workEugenides continues to show that he is one of the finest of contemporary novelists.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In Eugenides' first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex (2002), English major and devotee of classic literature Madeleine Hanna is a senior at Reagan-era Brown University. Only when curiosity gets the best of her does she belly up to Semiotics 211, a bastion of postmodern liberalism, and meet handsome, brilliant, mysterious Leonard Bankhead. Completing a triangle is Madeleine's friend Mitchell, a clear-eyed religious-studies student who believes himself her true intended. Eugenides' drama unfolds over the next year or so. His characteristically deliberate, researched realization of place and personality serve him well, and he strikes perfectly tuned chords by referring to works ranging from Barthes' Lovers' Discourse to Bemelmans' Madeline books for children. The remarkably a propos title refers to the subject of Madeleine's honors thesis, which is the Western novel's doing and undoing, in that, upon the demise, circa 1900, of the marriage plot, the novel didn't mean much anymore, according to Madeleine's professor and, perhaps, Eugenides. With this tightly, immaculately self-contained tale set upon pillars at once imposing and of dollhouse scale, namely, academia ( College wasn't like the real world, Madeleine notes) and the emotions of the youngest of twentysomethings, Eugenides realizes the novel whose dismantling his characters examine.. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The publisher will be cashing in on the popularity of Middlesex, especially with public library users, by targeting much of their publicity campaign in that direction.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THERE was no predicting where Jeffrey Eugenides would go after his first two novels, so different were they in tone and form. "The Virgin Suicides" - humid, dreamlike, entranced - comes off as a single thought "Middlesex" a chatty multigenerational saga that winds its way from Turkey to Michigan to San Francisco to Berlin, sweeping together the burning of Smyrna, the rise and fall of Detroit, the immigrant experience, the Nation of Islam, the sins of Nixon and, of course, the lore and genetics of intersexuality, has as many moving parts as a Rube Goldberg machine. "The Virgin Suicides," edged with antic wit and edging toward the surreal, glances in Nabokovian contempt at the petty preoccupations of "rangers and realists." "Middlesex," for all the novelty of its hermaphroditic protagonist, is straight-up realism, start to finish. The books are far apart in quality, too. The language of "The Virgin Suicides" is taut and watchful from the first line, its mood a subtle synthesis of mystery and carnality. Like a myth, the novel imposes its own logic. In telling the story of five teenage sisters who kill themselves under the rapt gaze of the neighborhood boys, Eugenides showed a willingness to push to extremes, and the skill to bring it off once he got there. The book reminds me of Marilynne Robinson's "Housekeeping," another flaying first novel, both of them imagistically obsessive, spiritually uncompromising stories of water, light, death and girls. You almost can't believe the same person is responsible for "Middlesex." Clanking prose, clunky exposition, transparent devices, telegraphed moves - the novel is "Midnight's Children" without the magic, the intellect or the grand historical occasion, a hash of narrative contrivances with very little on its mind. In making these judgments, of course - the novel was a huge best seller and a Pulitzer Prize winner, to boot - I am joining a minority of perhaps no more than one. But I found the whole thing utterly unpersuasive. Take away its trendy theme and dollops of ethnic schmaltz (it could have been called "My Big Fat Greek Novel"), and "Middlesex" scarcely contains a single real character or genuine emotion. "The Marriage Plot" is yet a new departure - daylight realism, like "Middlesex," but far more intimate in tone and scale. Instead of three generations, it presents us with three characters, college students leaving Brown in 1982, the year before Eugenides did: Madeleine Hanna, a beautiful, uncertain WASP; Leonard Bankhead, her sometime boyfriend, brilliant, brooding, charismatic, poor; and Mitchell Grammaticus, authorial surrogate, a Greek from Grosse Pointe, Mich., who yearns in alternation for Madeleine and God. The novel starts the day the three graduate, returns to college to give us the back story, then follows their first year out. Mitchell heads to Europe and India, seeking sanctity; the others keep house on Cape Cod, where Leonard works in a genetics lab and Madeleine applies to graduate school. There is a marriage, and a kind of anti-proposal, and Madeleine studies the Victorian novelists (she calls her senior thesis "I Thought You'd Never Ask: Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot"), but the novel isn't really concerned with matrimony or the stories we tell about it, and the title, the opening glance at Madeleine's library and the intermittent talk of books come across as attempts to impose an exogenous meaning. The novel isn't really about love either, except secondarily. It's about what Eugenides's books are always about, no matter how they differ: the drama of coming of age. Eugenides is much more patient here, and much closer to his material, than he was in "Middlesex." "The Marriage Plot" is dedicated to "the roomies," and it possesses the texture and pain of lived experience. Eugenides has always been best on young love. "The Virgin Suicides" renders the magnificent terror of first sex as vividly as does García Márquez; the one episode where "Middlesex" comes to life recounts the protagonist's affair with his teenage crush. So it is here, but the novel is also great on the patter and pretentiousness of college intellectuals ("The bookshelves held the usual Kafka, the obligatory Borges, the point-scoring Musil"); on the sweet banter of courtship; on the kind of doormat nice-boy role that Mitchell submits to playing in Madeleine's life; and especially on what happens after you graduate, when the whole scaffolding of classes and the college social scene you've been training your personality around is suddenly taken away, and you have to grope for a new way to be in the world. The novel is equally good - sympathetic, modulated, deft - on Mitchell's struggle with his spirituality, Leonard's with the mental illness that asserts itself from early on, and Madeleine and Leonard's with each other. The story is wry, engaging and beautifully constructed. And yet it finally sells its characters short Mitchell's religious exploration, for all the attention it receives, all the intellectual sweat and practical commitment he invests in it and all its apparently genuine grounding in his soul, is ultimately dismissed as a sublimation of his desire for Madeleine. The novel's point of view alternates among the three main characters, but Leonard gets only a single time at bat, and the novel finally, and rather brutally, shunts him off the diamond altogether. As for Madeleine, she is given nearly half the novel, including its longest, opening section - not surprisingly, considering her creator's fascination with female experience - yet she somehow recedes behind the screen of Leonard's needs. Her character is almost wholly reactive; even the ways she resolves her relationships with Leonard and Mitchell are reactive. To put it in Hollywood terms, she doesn't have a "journey" as the others do. You could see this as the point - it's how young women often are - but the novel doesn't seem to be aware of what it's doing. In fact, Madeleine is the one character who does discover her vocation and, even more ironically, it's to be a feminist scholar of the Victorian novel. Yet despite the topic's supposed thematic centrality, we hear very little about this development. (Among other things, we never do find out what those "thoughts on the marriage plot" are.) "They didn't once ask if she had a boyfriend," Madeleine happily thinks about a couple of fellow aspirants who befriend her at an academic conference - yet it is all the novel asks. THERE seems to be another reason that the story makes so little of Madeleine's professional future. "The Virgin Suicides" depicts a group of girls who refuse to enter the flawed adult world, to live out what the narrators call "the melancholic remainder of our lives." In "Middlesex," which is, among other things, an allegory about the transformations of puberty, the protagonist's adulthood is essentially a blank. By the end of "The Marriage Plot," neither Leonard nor Mitchell has any evident direction into grown-up life, and Madeleine's is treated almost as if it didn't exist. Among the major male writers of Eugenides's generation - he was born in 1960, the year after Jonathan Franzen and two years before David Foster Wallace - becoming an adult is possible to imagine happening, at best, at excruciating cost, and often not at all. Which makes them pretty representative. For more on Brown University in the '80s, see "I Was an Under-Age Semiotician," by Steven Johnson, on Page 35. 'The bookshelves held the usual Kafka, the obligatory Borges, the point-scoring Musil.' William Deresiewicz, an essayist and critic, is the author of "A Jane Austen Education."
Library Journal Review
"The way of true love never works out, except at the end of an English novel." So says Trollope in Barchester Towers, one of those English novels where "the marriage plot" thrived until it was swept aside by 20th-century reality. Now Roland Barthes's contention that "the lover's discourse is today of an extreme solitude" better sums up the situation. Or so English literature-besotted Madeleine, 1980s Brown graduating senior, comes to discover. Giving in to the zeitgeist, Madeleine takes a course on semiotics and meets Leonard, who's brilliant, charismatic, and unstable. They've broken up, which makes moody spiritual seeker Mitchell Grammaticus happy, since he pines for Madeleine. But on graduation day, Madeleine discovers that Leonard is in the hospital-in fact, he is a manic depressive with an on-again, off-again relationship with his medications-and leaps to his side. So begins the story of their love (but does it work out?), as Mitchell heads to Europe and beyond for his own epiphanies. VERDICT Your standard love triangle? Absolutely not. This extraordinary, liquidly written evocation of love's mad rush and inevitable failures will feed your mind as you rapidly turn the pages. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/11/11.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.