The Brockporter Book Of The Week - The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

From the Amazon web site:

Even among authors, Jeffrey Eugenides possesses a rare talent for being able to inhabit his characters. In The Marriage Plot, his third novel and first in ten years (following the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex), Eugenides describes a year or so in the lives of three college seniors at Brown in the early 80s. There is Madeleine, a self-described “incurable romantic” who is slightly embarrassed at being so normal. There is Leonard, a brilliant, temperamental student from the Pacific Northwest. And completing the triangle is Mitchell, a Religious Studies major from Eugenides’ own Detroit. What follows is a book delivered in sincere and genuine prose, tracing the end of the students’ college days and continuing into those first, tentative steps toward true adulthood. This is a thoughtful and at times disarming novel about life, love, and discovery, set during a time when so much of life seems filled with deep portent.

I loved Jeffrey Eugenides Pulitzer prize winning book, Middlesex, and so I was looking forward to The Marriage Plot which I finally got around to reading. It is a coming of age story of three college seniors who are leaving the artificial cocoon of college life to join adult society.

The developmental task of young 20 somethings is to find a mate and procreate and yet our postmodern life has made the achievement of this task more complicated. This major life challenge is not as easy as it used to be because people have so many more choices than our grandparents did. Marriage is no longer primarily an economic institution but one sought out for its emotional and psychological satisfactions. As 50% of  people in first time marriages and 65% of people in  second marriages find out love (infatuation) is not enough to build a lasting relationship on.

Madeline, an English major, struggles between choosing Leonard or Mitchell two people who are quite different. Leonard is a biological science major who also has manic depressive illness, now days called bi-polar, and Mitchell is an introverted religious studies major who asks the big questions and approaches life with a degree of earnestness and introspection more typical of a medievalist than a young man in 1980s America. 

Madeline chooses Leonard and chooses wrong. Leonard becomes a lost soul, and Mitchell comes to his better senses and realizes that love is not enough to build a life on.

This book reads along enjoyably depicting college life at Brown in Rhode Island,  and the character development of the three main characters is very interesting. The dynamics of bi-polar illness are intimately described allowing the reader an appreciation of the impact the illness has on the person suffering from it as well as the impact on relationships and families.

The Marriage Plot is well worth reading if you are interested in the dilemmas and drama of young serious love which can have an impact on a life time.

Editor's note: The Brockporter Book Of The Week is a regular feature of the Brockporter Online News Magazine which appears most Fridays. If you have a book review you would like to share please send it to davidgmarkham@gmail.com