In his latest work, "The Marriage Plot," Jeffrey Eugenides alternates between the points of view of three different characters and flashes back to different moments in their past ad nauseam. This facet of the 406-page "epic" might make the act of reading it easy for those of us who suffer from internet- and texting-induced A.D.D., but, ultimately, it betrays an utter lack of inventiveness.
Eugenides' first novel, "The Virgin Suicides" (1993), tells—from a first-person plural perspective—the story of five suburban teenage girls who kill themselves over the course of a year. "Middlesex" (2002), his sophomore effort, offers a multigenerational account of a Greek-American family in Detroit and won Eugenides that year's Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
Those aware of the author's accolades speculated as to what he might would do in his third novel and anxiously awaited its arrival. Critics have been divided on the success of the final product. It's my opinion that if "The Marriage Plot" has any clear direction, it's in circles.
Set in the early 1980s, the story follows three Brown University seniors as they graduate from college and spend the next year of their lives traveling to places as diverse as Paris, Tangiers, and Calcutta, and as exotic as Providence, RI. There's the geeky religion major Mitchell Grammaticus; the hot and easily-bothered daughter of a college president Madeleine Hanna; and the brilliant, brooding playboy Leonard Bankhead.
Mitchell reminds us at regular intervals how in love he is with Madeleine, while Madeleine excitedly decides upon a career as a scholar of Victorian letters—in other words, unemployment.
Madeleine loves Leonard, who seems much less wedded to Madeleine than to his fits of depression. When Madeleine and Leonard set off for Pilgrim Lake Laboratory (famous for having housed Watson and Crick for some time), Mitchell sets off for Europe with his roommate Larry and then—on something of a whim—to India for service with Mother Theresa.
The scope of Eugenides' novel is ambitious, to say the least. It touches on several different topics—including yeast cell reproduction, semiotics, homosexuality, and the existence of God, to name a few—but deals with these subjects so superficially that the work feels quite sprawling in its reach. The larger topics are sometimes treated so prosaically as to actually offend.
The following passage made me angry enough to interrupt my reading of the novel: "Two things mania did to you were to keep you up all night and to enable nonstop sex: pretty much the definition of college."
It is my sincere hope that the majority of college students would object to such a reductionist, invalidating reading of the undergraduate educational experience.
Although Eugenides might retort that this passage was merely Leonard's point of view, I'd expect something more from a college student hired to work at the same research facility once inhabited by the founders of the double helix structure of DNA.
Given the lengths Eugenides goes to enumerate the titles that litter his characters' bookshelves and backpacks, it is clear that the references to other works of both fact and fiction are meant as tie-ins, but such allusions fail to comment on the action at hand or shed any new light on these older texts.
In fact, the references to other works come off more as an attempt on the author's part to ingratiate himself with connoisseurs of a certain level of literary sophistication (read: book snobs) more than anything else.
The novel's title and its discussion of the demise of the marriage plot in western literature by the turn of the 20th century (in Madeleine's senior thesis, of all places) go so far as to suggest that "The Marriage Plot" finds itself in league with works to which it makes direct reference, including Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" and George Eliot's "Middlemarch."
Considering all of this in combination with his simplistic treatment of certain topics (including unwarranted passing swipes at my home state of New Jersey) left a bitter taste in my mouth.
Ambitions and pretensions aside, however, the novel's characters occasionally feel like real people.
When Mitchell thinks that "not having an answer for the riddle of existence...was like that Talking Heads song. 'And you may ask yourself, How did I get here?,'" we might give Eugenides the benefit of the doubt and assume that this comparison comes from the perspective of a college senior (my friends and I regularly talk about our lives with reference to lyrics and TV writing) rather than from Eugenides himself.
It's just unfortunate then that he uses the same lyric in an epigraph to the novel, lending credence to the possibility that Eugenides was facing writer's block of the caliber known only to NBA point guards who have had the ill fortune of posting up against the likes of six-foot-11-inch center Dwight Howard.
For those readers who can overlook the book's weaker passages, however, it is possible to get caught up in the drama of its characters' predicaments. Given this fact and the hardcover edition's steep cover price ($28, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), "The Marriage Plot" cycles back and forth between feeling like a pageturner and potboiler.
Taken as a whole, the book's similes are cringe-worthy, its attempts at foreshadowing glaring, and its tone simply inconsistent. It's hard to say much in favor of a work as contrived as this one. Especially granted how the novel's best passages—which occur with increasing frequency after the first 150 pages—fail to come to anything substantial or contribute anything significant to my ways of thinking about the world.
Maybe my expectations were too high given the acclaim of Eugenides' last work and the opening sentence of "The Marriage Plot": "To start with, look at all the books." Maybe I expected more from all the topics he brings up, the references he makes, the characters he draws out.
All the same, I'm scratching my head as to how such a celebrated author could put out a piece of writing that is both showing and bursting at the seams.
Let's just say that were this the first novel Eugenides had written, it would take a limbo champion to clear the bar he'd have set for his career.