5. The Marriage Plot

By Jeffrey Eugenides

At some point after Deep Water, I stopped posting about stuff I read.  Although I still kept track of finished books, as a busy working parent, something had to go so I stopped writing about what I had read.  I must admit that before my pregnancy I did a fair amount of blogging at work.  So when my maternity leave ended and I returned to work, there was some adjustment to my new daily schedule, and well, I lost my momentum to write reviews.

It's 2020 now (more specifically, the 5th of May).  Still in Montreal, still living in the same neighbourhood, still working at the same company.  But now the COVID-19 pandemic has taken over the globe and my family is in our eighth week of home isolation and social distancing.  Finally I can devote more time to reading.  For at least a year now, I've been meaning to retroactively add all the books I've been reading since 2013.

These new entries won't be as thoughtfully written as before since I won't have much of the source material to quote fave passages, and my memory of details has faded significantly.  My main goal will be to simply track my reading.  Just yesterday Olman was looking for something to read, and I offered a Dawn Powell ('A Time to Be Born'), which he quite enjoyed.  He asked which one I had read, and I consulted Meezlyblog.  It was so satisfying to find my entry for 'Turn, Magic Wheel', which in turn helped me to remember the book, and whether I've read it!

The Marriage Plot was the last book in which I took the time to note down passages I liked.  I remember having really enjoyed this novel, which was an unabashed contemporary update of a Jane Austenesque situation amidst a collegiate setting in east coast America.  Kind of like if Whit Stillman were to write a novel, this would be it.

To summarize, the novel centres on Madeleine Hanna, who is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot, and her involvement with two different young men.

Even though Madeleine vacillates between Leonard Bankhead and Mitchell Grammaticus (those names), and is someone who is longing to be loved, her one true love is books, specifically classic English fiction. The plot itself is rather typical and the characters are the typically annoyingly over-educated privileged white American twenty-somethings.  My overall enjoyment of The Marriage Plot was the writing and how much it devotes itself to the love of English and American literature.

There are plenty of charming nuggets in the novel about Madeleine loving old musty books.

…Even now, at bed-and-breakfasts or seaside hotels, a shelf full of forlorn books always cried out to Madeleine. She ran her fingers over their salt-spotted covers. She peeled apart pages made tacky by ocean air. She had no sympathy for paperback thrillers and detective stories. It was the abandoned hardback, the jacketless 1931 Dial Press edition ringed with many a coffee cup, that pierced Madeleine’s heart…

   And yet sometimes she worried about what those musty old books were doing to her. Some people majored in English to prepare for law school. Others became journalists. The smartest guy in the honors program, Adam Vogel, a child of academics, was planning on getting a Ph.D. and becoming an academic himself. That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren’t left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical—because they weren’t musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they’d done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.

And this.

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights.  After getting out of Semiotics 211, Madeleine fled to the Rockefeller Library, down to B Level, where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold, and grabbed something—anything.  The House of Mirth, Daniel Deronda—to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative!  Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel.  There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

And this.

The thing about the Victorians, Madeleine was learning, was that they were a lot less Victorian than you thought. Frances Power Cobbe had lived openly with another woman, referring to her as her “wife”.   In 1868, Cobbe had published an article in Fraser’s Magazine entitled “Criminals, Idiots, Women and Minors. Is this Classification Sound?” Women were restricted from owning and inheriting property in early Victorian Britain.  They were restricted from participating in politics.  And it was under these conditions, while they were classified literally among idiots, that Madeleine’s favorite women writers had written their books.  

And this humourous exchange. 

  “Are you actually reading that?”

Mitchell looked up to find Claire staring at him from the bed.

  “Hemingway?” she said dubiously.

  “I thought it would be good for Paris.”

   She rolled her eyes and went back to her book. And Mitchell went back to his. Or tried. Except that now all he could do was stare at the page.

   He was perfectly aware that certain once-canonical writers (always male, always white) had fallen into disrepute. Hemingway was a misogynist, a homophobe, a repressed homosexual, a murderer of wild animals. Mitchell thought this was an instance of tarring with too wide a brush. If he was to argue this with Claire, however, he ran the risk of being labeled a misogynist himself. More worryingly, Mitchell had to ask himself if he wasn’t being just as knee-jerk in resisting the charge of misogyny as college feminists were in leveling it, and if his resistance didn’t mean that he was, somewhere deep down, prone to misogyny himself. Why, after all, had he bought A Moveable Feast in the first place? Why, knowing what he did about Claire, had he decided to whip it out of his backpack at this particular moment? Why, in fact, had the phrase whip it out just occurred to him? 

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So many more delightful passages that would be too much to include here.  So very glad I found this hardcover at my neighbourhood thrift shop.