A review by camiarnett97
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

emotional reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Though this book could easily be called pretentious, and I don’t think it would be a bad assessment, there is so much depth to the lives of the three main characters and verisimilitude to the world in which they lived that I found myself totally engrossed, even when I felt disapprobation or frustration with the characters, even when the book was at its most pretentious. It rewards attentive, open-hearted reading. It’s a book about flawed, mostly very privileged people caught in a love triangle, but it’s also about the meta idea of a marriage plot and the function of marriage in a narrative. I’m really fond of people who struggle with narrativizing their lives, so despite their copious flaws, I found myself identifying with the ways in which the characters, especially Mitchell, were lost in their fantasies. I could easily see myself making the same mistakes Madeline did. I even identified with Leonard’s mania, and I found his struggles to be particularly impactful. The marriage plot hurt him, too.

I would not say that this is the book for everyone, but it was beautifully written and rendered. I want to go through it with a fine-toothed comb to examine the structure, the manipulation of time through flashback. It only takes place over the course of a year, and yet memories from these characters’ entire lives are woven in so seamlessly you feel as if you’ve followed them since birth. It’s a very intimate novel, in all the good and bad intimacy can bring, but despite, or likely because, of its heavy debt paid to previous works and its pretentions, it is surprisingly honest.
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