Novel of the week: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

last updated 8 January 2015

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28)

“The campus novel is with us unto the end of time,” said Carlin Romano in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Jeffrey Eugenides’s “poignant” and “wise” third novel focuses on a trio of undergraduates at Brown University in the early 1980s. Madeleine, a lover of 19th-century novels, has spent years secretly seething as professors preached that the novel died when the decision of whom and when to marry ceased to be a viable plot basis. Meanwhile, she faces decisions about her own romantic future, with either Leonard or Mitchell. Since Mitchell is a stand-in for Eugenides and the bandanna-wearing Leonard is obviously based on the late David Foster Wallace, a storm of “metafictional games” seems promised, said Jennifer Szalai in The New York Observer. But Eugenides proceeds instead to deliver a love story “so conventional” it’s bizarre. The author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex is clearly striving to reinvent the Victorian era’s “marriage plot for a different age.” You just wish someone had told him that “chick lit” authors have been doing the same for years.