The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
So much to say, so much to marvel at, I'm like a three year old hopping up and down and not able to get the words out quite right. Hands down, the best book of 2011. (I technically devoured it in the early moments of 2012, but it was published, with great fanfare, in the waning hours of 2011).
Jeffrey Eugenides, peddler of the acclaimed Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides, strikes again. With verve and vigor, he characterizes the sacred, irredeemable time of the undergraduate transformation. The setting is Brown, in its middle-of-the-road Ivy league sanguinity, in the early 1980s, where punks and preps collide delightfully for Halloween parties and Dostoyevskyean discourse.
The perpetrators are Madeline, a wisp of a Nabokovean nymphette, promulgated into goddess like heights by Mitchell, a quiet, divinity-school-bound, harrowingly introspective type; one of those who forgoes the anamalistic rituals of fraternities for a much more hip version of existential sorrow. Although tripping over himself with love for Madeline, Mitchell can't break the spell of the intellectual rock-starism and bedroom antics that Leonard uses to charm most of the female campus, including the starstruck Madeline.
About the same time that Leonard's pysche fractures over the revolutionary concepts of the English department's popular "Semiotics" theories, Madeline inserts herself into his world, and they are joined in a nebula of social and intellectual isolation in a think tank for which Leonard now works. After a secret marriage and a weekend at Monte Carlo that defies debauchery, Madeline knows that she has made the wrong choice.
Mitchell meanwhile, is communing with elephants, yogis, and the grotesquely dying in India, as a misguided pennance to himself. His round-the-world trip full of romantic ideals doesn't pan out as planned, partly due to the sexual revelations of his traveling companion, and mostly due to obsessive thoughts of Madeline.
In the midst of it all, Madeline's thesis on the 'Marriage Plot'- on how the modern novel no longer depends on the device of marriage to sustain it, postulating that feminism caused the demise of the beloved novel- is published in an acclaimed literary journal. While the detritus of Mitchell's mental illness piles up along her shores, Madeline realizes that she is not the delicate WASP willow she was groomed to be, and steps out of cloistered Ivy league society and into the wilds of the world.
