'Marriage Plot': A literary love triangle

THE MARRIAGE PLOT, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 406 pp., $28.

On the surface, the new Jeffrey Eugenides novel, "The Marriage Plot," doesn't sound like much. For 400 pages, three Brown students in the early '80s go to parties, fall in love with ideas, negotiate a love triangle and struggle with life after graduation. In "The Virgin Suicides," Eugenides' bravura 1993 debut, he accomplished a seemingly impossible feat, transposing the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez to suburban Grosse Pointe, Mich. In the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Middlesex" (2002), he was even more ambitious, creating a hermaphrodite named Cal whose story becomes a sprawling saga of the Greek Diaspora and the decline of Detroit. By contrast, "The Marriage Plot" sounds less like the third book by one of America's most acclaimed writers than the abandoned first novel of someone not very promising. But "The Marriage Plot" turns out to be a tour de force -- riveting, deep, funny, devastating and profoundly humane.

Our heroine, Madeleine Hanna, is beautiful and privileged, enthralled by Jane Austen and George Eliot and thus slightly at odds with the bohemian poseurs surrounding her at Brown. "Everyone in the room was so spectral-looking," Eugenides writes, "that Madeleine's natural healthiness seemed suspect, like a vote for Reagan." Her friend Mitchell Grammaticus, whom we first see sitting in a half-lotus on the college green, is dabbling in religious faith, while carrying a torch for her. Mitchell -- given to "baggy secondhand suits and beat-up shoes, sort of a drunken preacher or Tom Waits look" -- turns out to be a kind of stand-in for the young idealistic suitors in Madeleine's beloved 19th century novels. His fiery, Byronic rival is Leonard Bankhead, a dual major in biology and philosophy, a misfit and a lady-killer with mysterious charisma.

Whom will Madeleine choose? This apparently simple question leads not to screwball complications but to hilarious set pieces (a fake "party" that is really a performance art joke, an adolescent fixation with the Lithuanian string instrument called the kokle). And it leads to serious, at times chilling drama. Mitchell goes to India, where he fails to live up to the challenge of Mother Teresa's Home for Dying Destitutes. Leonard's mysterious charisma turns out to be a symptom of manic depression, rendered by Eugenides with relentless focus as Leonard comes apart at a think tank on Cape Cod. When Madeleine does make her choice, her life becomes a harrowing slide toward despair. "She felt as if she'd aged 20 years in two weeks," Eugenides writes, and we know what he means. What we imagined might be almost a light romantic comedy turns out to contain full-blown tragedy.

"The Marriage Plot" always goes deeper than we expect. The characters are smart without being smug, funny without being reflexively ironic; they talk about books without being bookish, without making us groan or die of boredom. Yet all are on a sincere quest for meaning. Despite their youth and their socioeconomic bracket, we take them seriously, are engaged with them, see ourselves reflected back without embarrassment, even with a surprising dignity. Eugenides empathizes with Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard to a degree we do not expect from the ludicrous tone of the latter two's surnames. But neither is Eugenides sentimental. As soon as you think it might get too McCartneyish, a Lennon side kicks in.

Writers make their mark by their sensibilities, their styles. I mention this because there's a peculiar dynamic in the rivalry between Mitchell Grammaticus and Leonard Bankhead that's hard to discuss. It's hard to discuss because Mitchell has more than a little in common with his creator, and because Leonard bears more than a passing resemblance to the late writer David Foster Wallace. Wallace was a mannerist -- all style, all the time. Eugenides is a classicist -- the style always in harmony with everything else a novelist has to do. Until his death in 2008, Wallace was the king of sensibility, possessor of a style so unique it made him the most identifiable prose writer of his generation. It is to Eugenides' credit that Leonard is perhaps an even more memorable character than Mitchell. It is a sign of his magnanimity that in "The Marriage Plot," the rivalry between Mitchell and Leonard becomes a friendly one.

There has been a storybook quality to much American fiction recently -- larger-than-life, hyper-exuberant, gaudy like the superhero comics and fairy tales that have inspired it. By sticking to ordinary human truth, Eugenides has bucked this trend and written his most powerful book yet.

EXCERPT: 'The Marriage Plot' by Jeffrey Eugenides

To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Brontë sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-size but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn't trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for "Artistic," or "Passionate," thinking you could live with "Sensitive," secretly fearing "Narcissistic" and "Domestic," but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: "Incurably Romantic."

These were the books in the room where Madeleine lay, with a pillow over her head, on the morning of her college graduation. She'd read each and every one, often multiple times, frequently underlining passages, but that was no help to her now. Madeleine was trying to ignore the room and everything in it. She was hoping to drift back down into the oblivion where she'd been safely couched for the last three hours. Any higher level of wakefulness would force her to come to grips with certain disagreeable facts: for instance, the amount and variety of the alcohol she'd imbibed last night, and the fact that she'd gone to sleep with her contacts in. Thinking about such specifics would, in turn, call to mind the reasons she'd drunk so much in the first place, which she definitely didn't want to do. And so Madeleine adjusted her pillow, blocking out the early morning light, and tried to fall back to sleep.

But it was useless. Because right then, at the other end of her apartment, the doorbell began to ring.

Excerpted from "The Marriage Plot" by Jeffrey Eugenides, to be published in October 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2011 by Jeffrey Eugenides. All rights reserved.