Summer Reads...

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides - 2 stars **

This is an example of when choosing a book purely for the author's previous work isn't necessarily a good idea. I LOVED The Virgin Suicides by Eugenides, then read Middlesex, which was good but not amazing, then there was The Marriage Plot. 

It is about a girl called Madeleine, a lover of all things literature, and her senior year at Brown University, leading upto and including her first year post-graduation. She is in a relationship with a manic-depressive called Leonard, and has an estranged best friend called Mitchell, who is in love with her.

It is long and heavy going, pretentious and difficult to follow. The characters aren't particularly likeable, so I found that even when they were unhappy or bad things happened to them, I wasn't that bothered. It is set in the American University system, which I don't know much about so thought I may learn things, which I didn't. The language wasn't the figurative, descriptive prose of The Virgin Suicides, but overly wordy, informative text akin to what would be found in a non-fiction book on literary work and its authors, which isn't what I want when chilling out in the New York sunshine, where I read this book. Ironically one of my favourite sentences in the book, wasn't even written by Eugenides, but was a quote from Barthes, 'Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love?'.

This quote was in relation to Madeleines relationship with Leonard, who at the time in the book, is in a mental institution. The plight that the couple endure due to his illness is handled well in the novel, and I could imagine the hardships they faced, though I actually felt more compassion for Leonard as the sufferer rather than Madeleine as the one having to deal with it, as she comes across as quite selfish and unwilling to understand his situation.

The only section I can honestly say I enjoyed in the book, was when Mitchell went travelling around the world, as it describes the places he visits and the cultures he encounters. I particularly liked: 

'In Kalamata, a seaside city that smelled not of olives, as Mitchell expected, but of gasoline, he kept meeting his doppelgangers. The waiter at the restaurant, the boat repairman, the hotel owner's son, the female bank teller: they all looked exactly like him. Mitchell even resembled a few icons in the crumbling local church. Instead of providing a sense of homecoming, the experience sapped Mitchell, as if he'd been photocopied over and over again, a faint reproduction of some clearer, darker original.'

Aside from these two quotes, I would say not to bother with this novel, unless you are a literature student with a penchant for theory.