January Meeting
January 7th, 2012
For our meeting on Wed January 11th, we read The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.
Jacket Synopsis:
It’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. 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. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead – charismatic loner and college Darwinist – suddenly turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged relationship with him. At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus – who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange – resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his wife. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle graduate from college and enter the real world, they will be forced to re-evaluate everything.
Are 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, pre-nups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
Our Rating: ★★★½☆
Posted in Book Club
We gave The Marriage Plot 3½ stars out of 5. There are some big themes in this book – science vs spirituality; love vs infatuation; and the fine line that borders an engaged mind vs an insane or a depressed mind. The book club on the whole felt that it was a good and honest depiction of mental illness. Though one member commented that at times it felt like the author was “showing off” about his subject without always “serving the story”. While the book kept our attention, most of us felt the characters were unsympathetic, self obsessed and at times unlikeable. Mental illness aside, we got a taste of 80s US college campus culture, with one member admitting that she took an online tour of Brown University, and realised she’d never be able to afford to send her daughter there! Despite the themes of the book, we felt the ending was hopeful for all characters.