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The Marriage Plot: A Novel Paperback – September 4, 2012

by Jeffrey Eugenides (Author)

745 customer reviews

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A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

Named a Best Book of the Year by
The New York Times Book Review • NPR • The New Republic • Salon • The Seattle Times • Houston Chronicle • The Miami Herald • Publisher's Weekly

"Remind[s] 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

"A grand romance in the Austen tradition."―USA Today

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?

It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, 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 studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes---the charismatic and intense Leonard Bankhead, and her old friend the mystically inclined Mitchell Grammaticus. As all three of them face life in the real world they will have to reevaluate everything they have learned. Jeffrey Eugenides creates a new kind of contemporary love story in "his most powerful novel yet" (Newsweek).

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Eugenides's ability to reinvent the timeless tale of love and soul-searching is swoon-worthy.” ―Vanity Fair

“I gorged myself on The Marriage Plot.” ―Geoff Dyer

“A masterful storyteller.” ―The Seattle Times

“Audacious and moving.” ―Time

“Extremely ambitious...surprising, and propulsive.” ―Chicago Sun-Times

“Deeply humane and elegantly constructed.” ―NPR

“The finale of The Marriage Plot is unexpected, beautiful, and---Dare we hope?---timeless.” ―The Cleveland Plain Dealer

“A master of voice.” ―The Washington Post

“Wry, engaging, and beautifully constructed.” ―The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.

Paperback: 416 pages
Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (September 4, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9781250014764
ISBN-13: 978-1250014764
ASIN: 125001476X
Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review: 745 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #30,659 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3406 in Books > Literature & Fiction > Literary
- #6885 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States

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Nick Nicholas, MSW

A Self-Referential Tale

March 8, 2017

Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase

The Marriage Plot is an entertaining book, although it is not without its flaws. The central characters are interesting and well developed, some more so than others, although all are limited and flawed. Because the age of the characters runs from their senior year of college to the year or so following graduation they are lacking in maturity and experience, which may make them uninteresting to many readers.

The novel pokes fun at post-modern literary criticism. However, it is itself an example of what is mocked earlier in the book when the conclusion of the book shows that the novel is really about ... itself. The reader cannot be certain if the author is being ironic here.

A major theme running through this text is reading, and the book, The Marriage Plot, is about marriage plots in a variety of senses, not the least of which is the fact that the novel itself is a marriage plot.

The strongest parts of the book are the trials and tribulations of one of the character's struggles with bipolar disorder. These descriptions are the most vivid sections of the book. Other characters are not quite as fully realized.

The author's handling of time is somewhat haphazard as he takes the reader erratically from one point in time to another with no transition. The reader often has to ask, "when are we?"

2 people found this helpful

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October 29, 2017

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Perhaps it was the topic, perhaps it was the characters, but after reading this book I found it so absolutely forgettable that I truly managed to forget that I actually had read it.

It sat on my Kindle reading list, until I read it again from start to finish. It was familiar, but anticlimactic like reliving a not-very-exciting dream sequence. As a college memoir, it is comprehensive and journalistic and not that far out of the ordinary.

The best thing about this book is the dark foray into living with an individual with mental illness, but even that is done superficially and might have been more moving if the writer had been able to help us get caught up in the madness of the character, rather than keeping us at such a "safe" distance.

Would love to see this rewritten from a place of passionate connection. This is a young adult love story and we all remember the throes of passion, and pain of loss, defeat and heart-break, but none of that is reflected in the story-telling. It reads as Love on Prozac.

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Started off slow but I ended up really liking this book - highly recommended.

November 10, 2014

Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase

Brief summary and review, no spoilers.

This novel - set in the early 1980's - follows the lives and is told from the point of view of three main characters.

The first is Madeleine Hanna and she is graduating from Brown University and she is in some distress. She has just broken up with her boyfriend Leonard and she is not sure what she is going to do next. Madeleine is an English and literature major and she hopes to go to Yale for graduate school. We read early on how focused she is on classic literature and her love of books predominates her life. That is in addition to her boyfriend Leonard.

Leonard Bankhead is a fellow student at Brown, albeit from a completely different background. Whereas Madeleine came from a well-to-do academic family, Leonard on the other hand comes from a dysfunctional family from Portland Oregon. He is a brilliant student and a very handsome guy, but Leonard also seems prone to moodiness. More about that later in this review.

Madeleine is passionately in love with Leonard, but there is our third main narrator who is passionately in love with Madeleine. His name is Mitchell and he is also a fellow student. He is from Detroit and comes from a stable and loving Greek family. Mitchell has alway felt that he and Madeleine would some day get married. He just hopes that she will feel that way as well.

We know that Mitchell is a sensitive, good guy who is searching for his own morality and place in the world. After graduation he goes on long trip to Europe and India with his good friend to do some soul searching and decide whether he wants to come back to the U.S. to get a degree in religious studies.

It took me a few chapters to get into this novel. There is a lot of academic discussion about literature and theory and that slowed me down a bit. In fact I would see whole pages with no paragraph breaks and I was tempted to skim.

But soon enough I was very taken with the story and I ended up really, really liking this book. Not only do these 3 characters feel and act so real, we begin to feel a bond and want to root for each of them.

Will Madeleine end up with Leonard? Will Mitchell end up getting the girl? We won't know till the end, but know that the ending is ultimately satisfying.

One last comment, and this is s a tiny bit of a spoiler so do not read further if you don't want to know anything more even though I really think knowing this won't detract from your enjoyment of the story - this novel gives the best first person description of mental illness I may have ever read. In particular, depression and being bi-polar, referred to as manic-depression back in the 1980's. Not only do we view and understand its horrors from the person suffering, we see what it's like for those who love and take care of these people.

Highly recommended.

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Most recent customer reviews

Jayne McElhaney

Put this at the top of your list of books to read

Excellent writing. I could not put it down. My favorite summer read this year

Published 8 days ago

alta clark

A must-read for every young woman

I’m a senior in college, about to graduate with a humanities degree and no idea what my next step in life is going to look like.Read more

Published 21 days ago

V. Sibirsky

I really did not like this book

I really did not like this book. For. while in the earlier pages I got intrigued with the Literary references and if I didn't recognize some, I looked it up.Read more

Published 1 month ago

Tomisin Ogunsanya

Five Stars

Beautiful novel. Recommend it 100%. Esp for those that enjoy cinematic prose.

Published 1 month ago

joanne olivier

Been there done that

I would recommend this book to college age kids or twenty somethings. I really didn't care about these characters.Read more

Published 2 months ago

Pamela Callaway

One Star

Hmmm

Published 3 months ago

Smokey

Five Stars

Interesting to see the development of this author.

Published 4 months ago

Tina Lou

A good read.

Well written. A good read.

Published 4 months ago

Emma

Not Eugenides's best work. I found "A Lover's Discourse"

Not Eugenides's best work. I found "A Lover's Discourse", which I read after reading "The Marriage Plot", far more interesting. Check that one out!

Published 5 months ago

Amazon Customer

One Star

I didn’t like anything!

Published 5 months ago

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