“The Marriage Plot” by Jeffrey Eugenides (Reviewed by Jessica Freeman-Slade)

The themes of the quarterlife crisis novel are easy to predict. Questions of identity, misadventures in love, and all the clichés that make up the not-quite-established life. One would think that Jeffrey Eugenides, the uncontested master of youthful despair, would steer far away from this material. Yet when you’re a plumber of teenage anxiety, you’ve still got plenty of material to mine once those teenagers have gone to college. In The Marriage Plot (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $28.00), Eugenides takes on the early twenties of three college friends—the English major Madeleine Hanna, her unstable and charismatic scientist boyfriend Leonard Bankhead, and her theologian friend Mitchell Grammaticus. When he sends Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard into the world, Eugenides also embarks on a hunt for the signs and symbols of adulthood—the semiotics of identity, of meaning, of investment in the right, important things.

Madeleine is a conventional heroine—blandly pretty, blankly intelligent, and mostly a projection of Mitchell, Leonard, and the reader’s expectations. She “major[s] in English by default. . . . English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.” Yet her indecision and sudden passions may speak to many former English majors—when Eugenides notes her overly enthusiastic reading, “frequently underlining passages,” even a generous reader will cringe with guilty recognition. Dipping inside Madeleine’s reading habits is like opening her diary—immediate intimacy, too much sincerity, and uncomfortable exposure to someone else’s investment in the book’s romance. When she meets Leonard, a fellow student in a senior-year semiotics class, Madeleine becomes a stand-in for the ideal reader: impressionable and far too susceptible to potential scenarios. Ignoring the smitten (and stable) Mitchell, Madeleine falls for Leonard and his manic-depressive brilliance. It’s the default response of the overeducated and well-read when faced with an indeterminate future: When you don’t know what to do with yourself, choose a plotline. Madeline decides on the marriage plot, but there are others. The pilgrim plot. The madman plot.

Eugenides has conquered more daring scenarios than this—what is an intellectual love triangle compared to the Lisbon sister suicides, or the life of a hermaphroditic Greek-American? Yet in tracing his three characters through their troublesome post-graduation years, Eugenides shows the limitations of treating life as an intellectual exercise: none of these plotlines take their characters where they’re hoping to go. Though Mitchell takes a road trip for religious redemption, volunteering for Mother Teresa in Calcutta, he clings to an abstract, sanitary idea of suffering. He puts off confronting both true poverty and true devotion, because real sacrifice is too scary. He shies away from those in most desperate need, prioritizing his physical comfort—and questioning his eternal comfort as well. “What if you had faith and performed good works, what if you died and went to heaven, and what if all the people you met there were people you didn’t like?” Unable to put others first, Mitchell fails to achieve (in India, at least) the spiritual transcendence he’d hoped for. He is, ultimately, no pilgrim.

Leonard, the madman, is constantly at odds with himself. Knowing  his brilliance—and sexual magnetism—become muted when he has to tame his brain’s misfiring impulses, he floats on the glory of his mania, even knowing he’ll eventually crash. Leonard’s main appeal (to the reader and to Madeleine) is his moodiness, his unpredictability; though his similarities to the late David Foster Wallace are hardly a cheat sheet, they suggest the torment he feels at constraining his intellect. “The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.” Toying with his Lithium dosage, Leonard gives his brain privilege over his body, ignoring its inevitable and real consequences on his life and his relationship with Madeleine. But the high of his mania is irresistible. It’s enough to make all plotlines, all rosy futures, seem possible to him.

But as a student in Madeleine’s semiotics class argues, “Books aren’t about ‘real life.’ Books are about other books.” We cannot shape our lives through them. For all aspirations to religion and service, Mitchell’s experience in India does not bring him to enlightenment; in fact it proves nowhere near as real as his pain over losing Madeleine. Leonard’s madness cannot bring him constant lucidity or concrete discoveries, and we never forget the danger of his chemical imbalance. And for all the books Madeleine has read, she cannot decode and plot Leonard as one might Mr. Rochester or Mr. Darcy. These characters want to order reality through knowledge—but day-to-day life cannot be transformed through semesters of study. A relationship is not a novel, or a religion, or a formula—it is wildly unplottable. All three characters are semiologists—they want the future, “that hard-won transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers.”

Thus it does not surprise the reader that Madeleine and Leonard’s relationship fails, that Mitchell trips over his longings, that entire marriages are ended by pronouncements made by religions none of the characters practice—we see it all coming. And yet, for all its predictability, The Marriage Plot still moves us to remember our own hollow, performative gestures of adulthood—the mimetic ballet of growing up.These characters long for something to believe in—an argument for how the universe is supposed to work, sublime and radical romantic devotion, or the joy of an untethered intellect—but Eugenides suggests that we have to eventually put away our books and seek meaning elsewhere. We have to invent the signposts of maturity, of accomplishment, for ourselves. And even when we’ve started to get it right, and are done living hand-to-mouth, we remember that we may never be done with living hand-to-forehead.

Jessica Freeman-Slade has contributed reviews and cultural criticism to the [tk] review, The Rumpus, The Millions, Side B Magazine, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She works in a managing editorial capacity at Alfred A. Knopf, and is currently working on a memoir about her misadventures as a prep cook. She lives in Morningside Heights.