The Marriage Plot By Jeffrey Eugenides - review

The Marriage Plot

In his first novel, The Virgin Suicides (1993), Jeffrey Eugenides told the macabre story of the deaths of five teenage sisters and the "soft decay" of a suburban American family.

Middlesex (2002), his follow-up, recounted the life of Cal, a hermaphrodite, who lives until puberty as a girl until s/he realises she might be a boy. From broadly the same generation of US writers as Douglas Coupland, Jonathan Franzen, Rick Moody and the late David Foster Wallace, Eugenides shares several of their concerns - among them a preoccupation with chronicling the texture of "ordinary" (read dysfunctional) American life - yet he shows a unique ability to tackle potentially difficult subjects.

The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex both owed much of their originality to their refusal to adopt a conventional stance or tone towards their themes.

Eugenides turned the suicides into a melancholy, horribly amusing, ghastly mystery: lushly written with surreal and Gothic shades of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Edgar Allan Poe. Middlesex, meanwhile, made Cal's tale into an American epic of immigration, assimilation and identity spanning several generations. Both books were driven by a strong initial idea, and made the most of it.

Can the same be said of The Marriage Plot, Eugenides's third novel? Not really. Its organising idea is to offer a 21st -century take on the classic nuptial narratives of Jane Austen, George Eliot and so many others, with a self-conscious, post-postmodernist spin. It opens as a campus novel set in 1982, following three American students (Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell) around the year of their graduation, who form a love triangle (Madeleine loves Leonard; Mitchell loves Madeleine). After beginning as a snappy comedy, however, the novel soon mutates into something rather more formless, gloomy and interesting.

The early chapters are bookish, yet light.

Eugenides has fun with the Eighties décor, satirising the high-flying talk in the semiotics seminars Madeleine and Leonard attend. The vogue for French theory in Eighties academia - Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard et al - provides Eugenides with many farcical moments. But the easy satire stops off campus as Leonard is hospitalised with manic depression, and Mitchell goes to India on a pseudo-religious quest. The pharmaceutical exaltation of the depressive runs parallel to the spiritual exaltation of the young pilgrim, and the novel moves into surprising, wild zones. The highs and lows of Leonard's depression are rendered in excruciating detail.

Eugenides is an energetic, subtle, likeable writer. Similar qualities to his previous novels are all here: a flexible, sinewy style and flair for narrative for its own sake; a fluency of point of view; a tendency towards excess, whimsy and slight emotional detachment. There's lots of so-so prose, especially in the dialogue, which lacks the coiled intensity of, say, Franzen, who even seems to polish his "ohs" and "uhs"; we're also a long way from the out-and-out complexity of David Foster Wallace. There's an immaturity to the subject to which Eugenides, now in his fifties, fully - gleefully - succumbs.

The Marriage Plot lacks the distinctiveness of Eugenides's earlier books. The "marriage plot" itself is its flimsiest suit. Yet if it doesn't have such clear definition, that's not a bad thing, and it remains highly enjoyable. Its main success is the extended depiction of the three young figures on the cusp of adulthood, grappling with the wider world, and the oddly stressful weightlessness of a phase before life hardens and takes shape.