Book Review: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

23 August 2012 Beijing, China

I know the feeling of losing a friend when finishing the last page of a novel, just like everyone else does. As most feelings, it’s not a unique one, despite the longing and sadness and those feelings are the most wretched and can seem the most individual. I have been in Beijing, China for just six days. I left my boyfriend, my lovely city, Chicago, my parents, and my friends. I brought my kindle, no physical books, but a dozen or so recently purchased and uploaded.

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides was one I started after my road trip to Seattle last October. My best friend, Clare, and I were transporting her harp cross country (from Bloomington, IN, our old college town, to Seattle, where she lives and works), and Eugenides was doing a reading at the Seattle Public library just days after our arrival. The Seattle Central Library is my favorite place to wander through (I wrote about this place and took heaps of photos!) . Going to a book reading in Seattle was something I had come to make my personal habit each time I visited the city, having seen Chris Adrian just a few months prior.

The library auditorium was packed and Eugenides read an exerpt. I was put off by the novel almost immediately. I was an English major at University, and the novel describes three undergraduates: an English major girl, a Religious Studies major guy, and a Biology major guy. Though I loved my literature courses, I was a terrible student. I wanted to be successful and join literary groups and reviews, but I was completely overwhelmed and should have switched to a different major early on. My peers were vastly more intelligent than me, I was afraid of my professors, and by the end of my degree I had developed a very real anxiety when I tried to speak up in class. I passed  my courses, but was too daunted to try harder, opting for classes outside of my department in ceramics, aesthetic philosophy, Japanese literature, and Kenyan anthropology. I was unfocused and even now I feel like I spent so much money and am now in debt for feeling like a failure for four tedious years.

Madeline Hanna is obsessed with Victorian literature and while at university, she discovers post-modernism and semantics. She learns of Derrida and alternate theories of thought. She loves the Victorian period, but finds herself wanting to join the “cool” people in the literature department and takes packed semantics courses and genuinely falls in love with Barthes. I went through this, too. Derrida was the corner stone of conversations with my lit friends. I am painfully in love with Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse is my favorite novel ever written. I love Flannery O'Conner. I love Hemingway. I hated reading about Madeline in the beginning of The Marriage Plot because it reminded me of how much of a failure I felt I was during college. Everyone was smarter than me, and I was becoming angry with feeling yet again unable to keep up with the more difficult references Eugenides describes. Even writing these few paragraphs is infuriating because my vocabulary is so limited. I’m not a genius writer and I know that, but why I can’t I be a genius reader?

So much of the novel touched who I am right now. Right now I am a selfish person. I left someone I loved and I moved around the world and I am confused and I want to find myself and I want to know my life is progressing well and I am doing the right things to make things HAPPEN. While Madeline is someone I identify with emotionally, though she is extremely more impulsive than I could ever be, Mitchell is who I identify with intellectually. He is the Religious Studies major and he loves Madeline. He questions his faith and his place in the world as regularly as I do. While he studies and is open to all religious thought, he is looking at religion philosophically. One of my favorite parts of the novel is when Leonard (the third, Biology major) recalls having a class with Mitchell. Students in the class are discussing

“Ghandi and how his belief in nonviolence had inspired Martin Luther King, which had led to the Civil Ridghts Act.  The speaker’s point was that it had actually been a Hindu who had made America, as so-called Chiristian nation, a more just and democratic place.

            At which point Young Waits [this is Leonard’s name for Mitchell] spoke up “Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy… Gandhi got his philosophy of nonviolence from Tolstoy. They corresponded… He called Tolstoy his ‘great teacher’… Martin Luther King got nonviolence from Gandhi. But Gandhi got it from Tolsoty, who got it from Christianity. So Gandhian philosophy really isn’t any different from Christian pacifism.” P260

The conversation continues between Mitchell and his classmate discussing Gandhi’s inability to accept immaculate consumption and resurrection explaining that Christianity is full of myths. The student countering Mitchell is an advocate of Buddhism as being a belief system that is more pure and less forceful as organized Christianity. The student insists that Christianity is full of myths and Buddhism is better because “it doesn’t force you to believe anything.” Mitchell then responds with what happens when the Dalai Lama dies and Tibetan Buddhist search for his spirit that has been reincarnated into another baby, pointing out that the baby always lives in Tibet.

At the time, infatuated with Nietzche, Leonard didn’t want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn’t that all reliegions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical. P262

Mitchell searches for answers in a way I think I do and I hope I actually am capable of doing. He is well read and remembers everything. He can lay out strong arguments, unthreatened by conflict because he is open to hearing what other people say. He doesn’t wait to respond, but genuinely wants to have the discussion. Mitchell sees the value in the discussion and searching for the validation of victory or being marred by defeat after having succeeded or not in making a point. Patience is Mitchell’s most admirable trait. Mitchell is Eugenides’ most admirable character.

I felt Leonard’s energy physically while reading the novel. He is manic-depressive and while the depressiveness was a big part of his character, it was the manic episodes that I was most moved by. He reminded me of a friend so much, that I nearly sent an email to the friend suggesting he read this book, even though I know he never would. Even though the manic-depressiveness of my friend is such that I shouldn’t talk to him and suggesting that he is manic-depressive would further his current state of depression or pull him out of his manic-ness. Implusive and run completely by his emotions, I loved and hated Leonard. I overwhelmingly identified with Madeline’s love for him and need to be with him. I am older than Madeline now, though, and I became angry by her love-clouded mind. Her validations for staying with him were both familiar and upsetting.

In Beijing, looking over my new city, I am inspired by Mitchell. I describe myself as someone who is friends with artists and musicians. I am not naturally gifted at anything, but I surround myself with people who are. I am too smart to be ignorant of my short-comings. I used to be too proud to admit them, but traveling and moving and loneliness is humbling. I want to read philosophy and I want to exert myself. I want to find connections between Beijing and Chicago through the novels that I will read here. Chinese is an incredible language: I am already enchanted with the simplicity of the grammatical language and the complexity of the writing system. So wonderfully opposite of English, my love. Simple things in China are painfully difficult, but as I've found with everything that is hard, the reward is double. 

As my favorite person in the world says: "And on and on and on."