The Marriage Plot

“I tell my students, language is music.  Written words are musical notation.  The music of a piece of fiction establishes the way in which it is to be read, and, in the largest sense, what it means.  It is essential to remember that characters have a music as well, a pitch and tempo, just as real people do.  To make them believable, you must always be aware of what they would or would not say, where stresses would or would not fall.” 

-Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books

The music of Eugenides new book, The Marriage Plot, is set at a pitch and tempo which sings out that the author’s voice and experience is the primary voice.  In fact, I would argue that this book is probably based more on Eugenides personal experiences than any of his other novels.  His voice comes through most loudly in the character of Madeleine.  Madeleine is the apex of a love triangle that provides the relational geometry of the book.  A passionate but bipolar biologist, a spiritually searching and philosophically sensitive mystic, and a Victorian literature loving, sexually needy Brown graduate make up the primary characters in the novel.

Eugenides' voice and purpose in writing the novel comes through loudly in the first 50 pages in the reflections of Madeleine on her undergraduate class in semiotics (the study of the signs/symbols/analogies that make up the meaning of language or deconstruct it).  

Eugenides writes, 

“Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature.  They wanted to demote the author.  They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions.  They wanted the reader to be the main thing.  Because they were readers.

Whereas Madeleine was perfectly happy with the idea of genius.  She wanted a book to take her places she couldn’t go herself.  She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.  When it came to letters and literature, Madeleine championed a virtue that had fallen out of esteem: namely, clarity” (The Marriage Plot 42).

Eugenides authority and voice as an author has been well established in his previous award winning books The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex.  He applies the same skill at developing good characters in The Marriage Plot .  The Marriage Plot does not have the historical scope and literary development of place that Middlesex has (remember in that book how much you learned about Detroit, its history and people?  It was so interesting!).  Instead, the novel jumps from Brown University to Cape Cod to India to France and back to the East Coast again.  The story is fun to read and proved to be a great vacation book while flying across the country and then cozying up for a few rainy days at the coast.  The story is a love story, a coming of age story, and a reflection on the nature of writing, reading, and developing a narrative plot in the style of 19th c. Victorian literature.  All this plus some modern sexual intrigue in typical Eugenides style makes for an entertaining novel despite a slightly disappointing and rushed ending.

If you pick up this book don't miss the cover.  Jason pointed it out to me on the plane as I was reading.  What appears to be a simple wedding ring is actually an artistic image known as a Mobius Strip. Rather than a ring, a Mobius strip is a single continuous curve with only one boundary.  Perhaps a little further probing into this provocative image will shed more light on how Eugenides takes the traditional literary structure of 'the marriage plot' and reworks it to his own purposes in this novel.