THE MARRIAGE PLOT
By Jeffrey Eugenides
406 pages
Available at National Book Store
Chick films never show you what happens after the prim-but-loveable girl and the rough-but-charming guy get together in the closing credits. Sure, there’s the usual roller-coaster courtship before that — full of misunderstandings, breakups and pensive solo montages (usually set to some Jason Mraz music) in which the two realize how much they need each other, leading up to that final blissful embrace.
But The Marriage Plot by Pulitzer winner Jeffrey Eugenides tries to deconstruct the essential chick flick plot, which is roughly modeled on the Victorian novels of Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Henry James, George Eliot and others of the late 19th century. In its place, Eugenides substitutes, well, deconstructionism: the literary theories of Barthes and Derrida which were so fashionable on college campuses in the early ‘80s.
Beginning in medias res during the graduating rites of Brown University (which Eugenides attended), The Marriage Plot follow Madeleine Hanna, an English major by default (“…because they weren’t musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing no different from what they’d done since first grade: reading stories.”) who is pursued by several suitors and doesn’t know what to do with her life after donning her motor board and gown.
She’s dutifully attended by Mitchell Grammaticus, a childhood friend who’s been in love with her (or at least her stunning good looks) half his life. But she’s more attracted to a damaged Heathcliff — a brooding, bandana-wearing figure named Leonard Bankhead who chews tobacco in class and sees through all the New Criticism B.S. (bullshit, that is) of her classmates.
Leonard’s a biology major who just happens to audit English theory classes in his spare time, and Madeleine finds his mixture of intelligence and rough-hewn manliness charming. So far, so Austen.
She’s also not sure how to finish her thesis (“I Thought You’d Never Ask: Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot”), having come to the conclusion that the novels she’s loved all her life — those great Austen affairs, the halting Henry James romances, built around manners and propriety and a final resolution at the marriage altar — might not actually reflect the modern world. During her senior year she burrows deeply into Barthes (A Lover’s Discourse) which dissects What We Mean When We Talk About Love even more ruthlessly than Raymond Carver did. Meanwhile, she burrows into her love of Leonard, who seems to be modeled on David Foster Wallace (Bandana: check. Bulldog looks: check. Skoal tobacco: check), even down to the mental illness.
Yes, Leonard, it turns out, has manic depression, and when he’s up, he’s very, very up; when he’s down, he crashes through the floor into the abyss. And yet Madeleine, by the time she finds out about his condition, is more than halfway “all in.”
Eugenides has crafted an entertaining novel, though it sags a bit in the clinical details of manic depression and its effects on a relationship. And for a book with a central female protagonist, Madeleine plays a rather secondary role during Leonard’s mental struggles — giving unconditional support, ignoring his self-pity, shabby appearance and weight gain, shelving her own goals.
And the whole deconstructionist twist turns out to be a red herring. The novel never really subverts the genre of the “marriage plot” that Madeleine is so enamored of, and which her thesis adviser believes to be the “apogee” of the modern novel (it’s been all downhill since Austen, apparently). Well, romance novels may be different today, but they haven’t exactly gone into extinction. Even Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was a three-way romance with modern, endlessly digressive twists. Eugenides is less committed to the old plots of yore. But he does string the readers along for a good, long romance-baiting ride.
Mitchell, spurned by Madeleine as just a “friend,” heads off to India to pursue a year of meditation and “good works.” He’s a divinity student who has succumbed to the Jesus Prayer that Franny chants nonstop in Franny and Zooey (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner…”) in an attempt to reach some kind of spiritual inner peace. I’m starting to believe there should be a literary rule about J.D. Salinger references in modern fiction: similar to Chekhov’s dictum about not putting a gun onstage unless it’s going to be fired, the use of Salinger names, situations or story titles must be essential to the plot, not just postmodern hipster decoration. Here, at least, the Jesus Prayer is important to understanding Mitchell’s character. He is a seeker, but he looks in all the wrong places. Enchanted by Madeleine’s good looks, Mitchell tells himself that she’s the girl he will marry someday: it’s as though he’s been hit by a divine vision, but it’s only blinded him to reality. He starts reading about Mother Teresa and ends up in Calcutta, where he tries to do “service” to mankind by working in a clinic with wretched, dying patients.
This portion of The Marriage Plot is mirrored by Leonard’s working in a New England biology lab, trying to hang on to his research fellowship (examining yeast mating habits) while desperately hiding from his professors the fact that he’s on lithium and fighting manic depression.
Leonard has a dilemma: he’s fun and outgoing and quick-thinking while in the “manic” phase of his illness, but dull and depressed and shaky when faithfully taking his lithium. When sunk into depression, he dwells on past horrible experiences, a feature of depression that Eugenides captures well (“The worst part was that, as the years passed, these bad memories became, in the way you kept them in a secret box in your head, taking them out every so often to turn them over and over, something like dear possessions.”).
Both characters, it must be said, elicit sympathy from the reader. Madeliene herself emerges from being a self-entitled Brown girl to someone more circumspect about life, or at least willing to make the necessary difficult choices that, as my former professor Butch Dalisay liked to tell us, “raise the stakes” in fiction (as in life).
In undergrad college, I also recall we had an English teacher who broke down English lit into either comedy or tragedy: comedies, he said, ended in a marriage or two, while tragedies invariably ended with a death or two (or a stage full of dead bodies, as in Hamlet). Splitting lit down the middle was easy and tempting: marriage meant rebirth, spring, life and laughter; tragedy meant doubts, troubles, misguided deeds or wishes, death and isolation. But life is more complex than that when you get out of college.
It’s interesting that Eugenides sets The Marriage Plot in the early ‘80s for seemingly no particular reason: references to pop culture are few and fleeting (Talking Heads, Prince, Hill Street Blues) and serve no real purpose. Rather, his characters reference John Updike, Salinger, The Graduate, or people and obscure TV shows from the ‘60s. If anything, The Marriage Plot seems set in the ‘80s because that was when Eugenides came of age, and he does captures that era niftily — a sense of its new graduates casting about in pursuit of something in the world that actually matters and might be worth a life investment; or at least something that doesn’t vacillate between construction and deconstruction.