- Writing
- Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides has a lot to be proud of. In the span of ten years, he has managed to craft some of the most intimidating, authentic and audacious works of fiction to have entered the canon of Contemporary Literature. Granted, it may be a bit gauche to rehash the already-established reputation of an author’s previous work in the context of a review. However, to ignore Jeffrey Eugenides’ two previous works would be like dismissing Bob Dylan as an opportunistic hack for his 2009 Christmas album, Christmas In the Heart. Jeffrey Eugenides is a writer whose talents must be taken within the context of his whole body of work – and what a context!
Eugenides appeared on the literary scene with the 1990 publication of a short story in The Paris Review, titled “The Virgin Suicides.” The elegiac, subversively cynical story (which was, in fact, the first chapter of a full-length novel) went on to win both approval from his writerly peers, taking home the illustrious Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, as well as critical praise from the public at large. He later went on to publish the full novel. Narrated by a first-person-plural voice dubbed by critics “the Greek chorus” (much to Eugenides’ dismay), it tells the sad yet achingly humorous story of the five Lisbon sisters, young girls imprisoned within a Kafkaesque labyrinth of adolescent self-destruction.
In 2002, Eugenides followed up his debut with a novel seven years in the making, and what is in the humble opinion of this reviewer a masterwork of contemporary fiction. Middlesex, his second novel, concerns many things, but at its core recounts the Wagnerian saga of Calliope Stephanides, and her transformation into Cal, a suave, masculine Berliner. Middlesex’s most remarkable quality is, as with The Virgin Suicides, its distinctive, intimate and undoubtedly human voice. From the first page to the last, you are submerged in the charged psyche of a lost soul, someone, Euginides’ sweeping prose suggests, whose tale is in fact the story of everyone. It electrifies, it perceives, it illuminates.
Having said all that, it is somewhat unfair to place The Marriage Plot, his follow-up to Middlesex, in stark comparison with Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides, in that Euginides seems to be doing very different things with his first two novels. Comparing them would be like comparing James Joyce’s Ulysses with Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist. Therefore, for the purposes of this review, I will refrain from overtly pitting Euginides’ works against each other directly.
On its surface, The Marriage Plot explores the interpersonal relationships of three recently graduated Brown students, and their individual exploration and discovery of the horrifying landscape of adulthood and its many ways of leading to disappointment and dissatisfaction. Euginides writes primarily about self-reflective characters who muse on past relationships, current carnal entanglements and future plans. Madeleine, the novel’s heroine, spends about a third of the novel reading Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse for advice on how to think about her feelings for Leonard, her sort-of soul mate. Mitchell, a former lover of Madeleine’s, is told he has a successful future in theology, but instead decides to go to Europe to look at art instead of Madeleine’s tantalizing figure. Leonard, in a fit of emotional instability, “tries to kill himself,” perhaps as a last bid to rid himself of Madeleine for good, but more likely as a way of getting her to pay more attention to him.
It’s situations like this that shakily propel the book’s plot. Madeleine, after a night of heavy drinking, tries with all her might to keep her parents from seeing her with a hangover on graduation day. Leonard obsesses over the fact that Madeleine never defecates in his presence. Madeleine spends twenty pages worrying about an acceptance to a graduate program at Yale, only to discover she has been rejected; once this happens, she just shrugs and decides she will move in with Leonard instead. Sadly, unfortunately, uncontrollably, the reader shrugs right back, thinking “so what?”
You get the sense that Eugenides is trying very hard to get at something complex and messy via the relationships exhibited. If the relationships are anything they are messy, but messy in the sense that Eugenides keeps arbitrarily piling on more and more infidelity, more sex, more social politic, but to no gratifying end. The final result is a dramatis personae composed of one-dimensional, whiny, unsympathetic protagonists. However, I will say to Eugenides’ credit that his three main characters are nowhere near as moronic or insipid as Madeleine’s parents — and I don’t mean that in a good way. They’re the kind of characters who you are consciously aware of as being written as shallow and freakish, which is the first clue that they are poorly-done. They aren’t funny, realistic, or interesting. They aren’t even obnoxious. The only obnoxious party in this case is Eugenides himself, who thinks that by writing two characters to blindly nag and berate a young woman, he can create two parents whom readers will interpret as reflections of their own parents. It just doesn’t work in any shape or form.
I will say this. Eugenides’ effort was indeed admirable, and in many ways I am surprised he failed so spectacularly in achieving his outcome. The dust jacket rhetorically asks whether or not the 19th century novel is truly dead, and whether Great Literature has at long last succumbed to the incomprehensibility of postmodernism. The Marriage Plot, I suppose, is Eugenides’ attempt at writing a modern-day novel in 19th century form. But is Madeleine a 1980’s Dorthea Brooke, and Leonard a Heathcliff? No. For so many reasons, no.
Even the novel’s setting, Providence in the 1980’s, offers no real substance to the plot. The fact that every other college student has pink hair, owns a Talking Heads poster, smokes pot while pontificating on Derrida, serves no purpose whatsoever, other than maybe to permit Eugenides a chance to write about something he knows on a directly personal level (he attended Brown undergrad in the 80’s himself). I wish it did — I love the 80’s aesthetic. It was a time of true artistic transformation. It had an ironic depth. The 1980’s as crystallized by Eugenides’ prose is not an aesthetic — it is a poorly-constructed plot device.
Before the novel’s publication, I read a portion of one of the chapters in a New Yorker magazine. I loved the story. It was short, concise, sharp — everything a New Yorker fiction piece should be. In the case of The Marriage Plot, brevity would have made Eugenides’ tale of woe and sexual revelation in 1980’s Providence, RI an elegant piece of contemporary fiction. Eugenides’ fatal flaw, then, was to expand the story into a 450-page novel. The additions do nothing to the story’s core elements: complicated, messy love that leads to despair and confusion in a crazy world. It just makes the whole experience more tedious.
My advice? Go read Middlesex. Life’s too short to waste on insignificant interludes like The Marriage Plot.
