Chris Schluep About the Author:īook Description Paperback. This is a thoughtful and at times disarming novel about life, love, and discovery, set during a time when so much of life seems filled with deep portent. What follows is a book delivered in sincere and genuine prose, tracing the end of the students’ college days and continuing into those first, tentative steps toward true adulthood. And completing the triangle is Mitchell, a Religious Studies major from Eugenides’ own Detroit. There is Leonard, a brilliant, temperamental student from the Pacific Northwest. There is Madeleine, a self-described “incurable romantic” who is slightly embarrassed at being so normal. In The Marriage Plot, his third novel and first in ten years (following the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex), Eugenides describes a year or so in the lives of three college seniors at Brown in the early 80s. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title.Īmazon Best Books of the Month, October 2011: Even among authors, Jeffrey Eugenides possesses a rare talent for being able to inhabit his characters. Jeffrey Eugenides creates a new kind of contemporary love story in 'his most powerful novel yet' ( Newsweek). As all three of them face life in the real world they will have to reevaluate everything they have learned. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes-the charismatic and intense Leonard Bankhead, and her old friend the mystically inclined Mitchell Grammaticus.

But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. 'A grand romance in the Austen tradition.'― USA TodayĪre the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? 'Remind us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love, and in love with books and ideas.'―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist

The marriage plot eugenides