The Marriage Plot (eBook)

Description

As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual 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 mate.

Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

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, prenups, 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.

About the Author

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis.

Praise for The Marriage Plot…

"Eugenides’s ability to reinvent the timeless tale of love and soul-searching is swoon-worthy."---Vanity Fair • "I gorged myself on The Marriage Plot."---Geoff Dyer • "A masterful storyteller."---The Seattle Times • "Audacious and moving."---Time • "Extremely ambitious…surprising, and propulsive."---Chicago Sun-Times • "Deeply humane and elegantly constructed."---NPR • "The finale of The Marriage Plot is unexpected, beautiful, and---Dare we hope?---timeless."---The Cleveland Plain Dealer • "A master of voice."---The Washington Post • "Great serious romantic fun."---Chicago Tribune • "Wry, engaging, and beautifully constructed."---The New York Times Book Review • "A remarkable achievement."---The Independent (London) • "You’ll never want The Marriage Plot to end."---Elle