Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (2011)

I am not sure what I think about this book. I really liked Eugenides' Middlesex and a little less so Virgin Suicides. Obviously Eugenides went through college just a few years after me, so the environment was similar - at an ivy league, after women had gotten some rights and felt they had more options than just getting married. In the beginning I did feel overwhelmed by the intellectual talk, as one Amazon critic put it: "reading it was like sitting between two members of the literary intelligentsia at a dinner party, as they try to one-up each other with the depth and breadth of their vast knowledge. I was simultaneously bored,lost and annoyed." 

I am a much more practical person, intelligent, and I obviously like reading, but do not have any urge to dissect a work, though it may be interesting at some point to figure out why I do or don't like certain books. I even started questioning the purpose of literary criticism or devoting your life to studying something like Victorian literature - never been a strong draw for me. This feels a bit blasphemous as I work in an academic environment. I can see looking closely how others write, so one could write better oneself. But I mostly see literature as the author sharing with the reader themselves, their ideas or flights of fancy, their times and experiences. Books are a place to learn about how other people think and act, about another historical time or culture or place, about other possibilities. For a while I really liked women science fiction and fantasy writers, who offered alternative societies to our own.

Back to the Marriage Plot. Was it a form of anti-marriage plot? Since I listened to this instead of reading it, I can't flip back to the marriage plot themes Madeleine was working with from literature, but I guess many books do have a marriage plot in them. And she was just looking at high falutin' literature, what about the sea of romance novels?

We meet the three main characters on graduation day at Brown, and though Madeleine is the main character, we get the story of Leonard and Mitchell too - from their points of view. We get the back story of each, and the plot swings between characters and times from childhoods into the first year after college. Madeline is into literature, Leonard into biology (got a sense of how scientists work and even if they are not in an academic environment, they are still highly dependent on grant funding), Mitchell into religious studies as he goes on his exploratory trip to Europe and India. I think in the end I liked Mitchell the best, though I can't say I felt close to any of the characters. The illness described was about the most valuable thing I took away from the book and some soul searching on if I could ever be there for a person that was seriously ill. I am afraid I am too self-centered for that.