October 21, 2011—The story told in The Marriage Plot, the new novel by Jeffrey Eugenides ’83, is as old as the hills: good boy loves good girl, who—sigh—loves bad boy. In this case, kind, sensitive Mitchell Grammaticus (who bears a strong resemblance to his creator, Jeffrey Eugenides ’83) secretly and unrequitedly adores his Brown classmate Madeleine Hanna, a pretty, tennis-playing WASP whose love of novels is exceeded only by her passion for a moody scientific genius named Leonard Bankhead. Leonard, however, doesn’t really love anyone, least of all himself. His toilet training was terrible; plus, he suffers from manic depression and can’t resist tinkering with his lithium doses. In other words, he’s Bad Marriage Material.

The Marriage Plot derives its title from the storyline that provided such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novelists as Austen, Flaubert, and Eliot with rich material. In an attempt to prove that the marriage plot is still powerful, Eugenides tells the story of these three young lovers in the months leading up to and following their graduation from Brown in 1983. It’s a seemingly straightforward realist narrative, told directly, humorously, and ultimately quite movingly.

Like his characters, Eugenides graduated from Brown in 1983, having studied English literature, creative writing, and religion. Like most literary students of that era, he was strongly influenced by the French deconstructionist critics. The Marriage Plot had its origins, he says, in a vision of a girl encountering Roland Barthes’s essay The Lover’s Discourse and suddenly finding her love life on the rocks. She wonders: Is romantic love only a figment of our literary imagination? And, if so, what does that say about her passion for Leonard Bankhead?

Eugenides’s first novel, The Virgin Suicides, is about five sisters who kill themselves, but it’s told in the first-person plural, from the perspective of a group of boys who are fascinated by the suicides: a postmodern perspective that made it a cult classic of sorts. Eugenides followed that early success with Middlesex, a sprawling multigenerational romp that starts with an incestuous coupling in Smyrna and results in the birth of a hermaphrodite grandchild a generation later in Detroit. It won the Pulitzer Prize, was chosen by Oprah for her book club, and sold upwards of three million copies.

With The Marriage Plot, Eugenides tackles something simpler: a love story. But he places it in the shadow of literary and intellectual fashion. Brown graduates from the early 1980s will delight in the pitch-perfect portrayal of the campus, which includes students smoking clove cigarettes and eating bagels down at RISD’s Carr House.

But, behind the wry humor and tongue-in-cheek philosophy, Eugenides does something tricky, which is to address the role of religion in a postmodern age. It’s here that the book’s real significance lies. During his time at Brown, Mitchell Grammaticus, like his creator, dallies with and then delves into religious studies. He ends up taking a life-altering course in contemporary Christian thought, which helps propel him toward Roman Catholicism and a pilgrimage to work with Mother Teresa in Calcutta. Mitchell is no saint, however, and he’s squeamish around the lepers, all but dropping one poor patient and fleeing the scene in shame. As Eugenides puts it, “We can’t all be Mother Teresa.”

That’s for sure. But some of us can help just by telling stories, and that’s something Jeffrey Eugenides does with both humor and grace.

Listen to a Macmillan Audio clip of The Marriage Plot narrated by David Pittu here. 

 

A Q&A with Jeffrey Eugenides

BAM In The Marriage Plot, you have a pitch-perfect description of a semiotics class at Brown, with students in black jeans and T-shirts with the sleeves and necks cut off. Was that your crowd?
Eugenides No, I was in the artsy group. When I first got to college, I was dressing sort of like Oscar Wilde. I was going to the vintage and used clothing stores on Thayer Street and buying suits from the 1940s. I thought I was flamboyant, but I was actually just ridiculous.

BAM What was your concentration?
Eugenides British and American literature. I did the honors program because it was more rigorous and more scholastic, requiring all these books from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—things I knew I’d never read unless someone required me to. I took a lot of writing and religious-studies courses. A lot of art classes. I didn’t take enough sciences. I got a little too humanities-centric.

BAM In the novel, the character Madeleine Hanna writes her thesis on the marriage plot in literature. What was the focus of your thesis?
Eugenides I did a creative thesis, a collection of short stories.

BAM Who was your adviser?
Eugenides John Hawkes. I came to Brown because John Hawkes was on the faculty. A teacher in my high school had gone to Brown and had all his books on the shelf, and I used to go in there and read them and be intoxicated and mystified.

BAM How do you describe The Marriage Plot to people?
Eugenides I don’t. I try to avoid that. I guess I’d just say it’s about three people getting out of college and facing life—just the facts of the case. Or I’ll say it’s a modern reinvention of the marriage plot. That’s true as well, though that seems more schematic than the book is. Or it’s a modern retelling of a marriage plot when the conditions of the marriage plot are no longer operative or tenable.

BAM In a 2004 Slate essay you described marriage as the greatest subject the novel ever had, and you lamented its death. Then you wrote a book about a marriage. Why?
Eugenides I was lamenting the death of that subject for a novelist, and of course when you lament the death of something you’re also calculating how you could bring it back [laughs]. To be honest, I was mainly writing about a young woman at Brown studying semiotics, and how her love troubles began when she was deconstructing the notion of love in her semiotics class. That’s where the book began.

BAM How does a novel like this come together for you?
Eugenides I knew that the book might have to do with marriage or the marriage plot. I didn’t—and I don’t usually—come up with an idea for a novel and then try to find the characters that would inhabit or express or embody that idea. I usually start with characters or a situation, and then some of my more intellectual ideas might or might not find their way into the book.

BAM So how does a modern novelist write about love and marriage in an age of divorce?
Eugenides It’s true that women do not get imprisoned by marriage as they used to in a Henry James or George Eliot novel, and one wrong choice on the part of a young woman does not necessarily doom her anymore, and the institution of marriage does not have the same strength it did. Even though these plots cannot necessarily happen today, we grew up reading these novels and watching the movies they gave rise to, and we have a lot of romantic idealism that the marriage plot gave life to. It’s going to affect a lot of your decisions. This is a book about people reading about love, and the effects of reading about love.

BAM In the book, Madeleine reads Roland Barthes’s The Lover’s Discourse, and it changes her life. Did semiotics change lots of students’ lives in those days?
Eugenides Semiotics in a way was one example of a moral relativism or a relativism that was coming into American culture quite strongly in the time. It had many different forms. But if you were a writer or wanted to be a writer you were attracted to semiotics for the rigor of the analysis and the sophistication of a lot of the arguments.

BAM Did it seem rebellious?
Eugenides The fact that it was European seemed attractive. And some of the arguments undermined a kind of complacent morality that you might have arrived at college with. That’s usually a good thing at college. I mean, college should destabilize your assumptions and make you rethink them. I think semiotics did that.

BAM Did semiotics shape you as a writer?
Eugenides What Madeleine goes through in terms of romance—questioning whether love is a kind of social construction—I had to contend with as a writer. I had to decide if writing a narrative and writing fiction that might be readable and not entirely experimental, whether that is a throwback or a kind of illusion. I was working her romantic problems out while I was working my own literary problems out.

BAM Did your enormous success with Middlesex make it any harder or easier to write this book?
Eugenides It always seems hard. My books don’t usually resemble one another, so I don’t have a lot to fall back on in terms of methodology. I’m always at sea, which is pleasurable, but also nervous-making.

Charlotte Bruce Harvey ’78 is the BAM’s managing editor.