I just finished Jeffrey Eugenides’ new novel, The Marriage Plot. The book follows three people from their days at Brown in the early 80s to the year after their graduation. Which pretty much explains my predicament down to a T. And! It’s intellectually rewarding in a (mostly referential) whirlwind-y review of major literary, religious, and scientific ideas sort of manner.
I never thought the particularly salient (but mundane) details of college and post-graduation anxiety were in any way unique to me or the people I knew. But this book distills it to its most wonderful, vivid form. The fact that it’s set at Brown, that I can recognize all the street name and the buildings, that the heroine worships novels while hoping to understand what everyone else is talking about in relation to semiotics by throwing herself in headfirst… it finally felt like a book I could actually relate to, despite all the differences between myself and everyone involved.
It’s funny how much the mere invocation of undergraduate motifs can immediately suck you back into a world where everyone is different but the same, and the question of what makes something ‘smart’ is at once infuriating and heartbreaking. And then, once you leave it all, even if it’s only for a short while, everything falls away, apart, so easily. So you ask yourself, how can something which once meant everything to me (this class, this paper, this exam) get pushed to the side so fluidly? Aren’t we supposed to have some kind of mourning period?
It turns out the answer is yes, in a rather roundabout way. Life may go on, but you never quite abandon the platitudes you researched and jabbered on about for four years, thinking to yourself, “Well, this may not be original, but at least I’ve realized it sooner instead of later.”
There’s more to the novel, of course. Its celebration of nerdiness, all the way from English conventions to yeast labs to half-hearted religious pilgrimages. A play on Victorian tropes, which is the whole basis of the title. And the question of, as the epigraph suggests, whether or not we would fall in love if we hadn’t read it in books, books very much like this one. All I can say is, the beauty of tropes is that they can be, for better or worse, incredibly satisfying to read. And so the cycle continues.
To start with, look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters. There were a whole lot of black-and-white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid-sized but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but finally being presented with an outcome that cut both ways and made you feel different depending on the day, the hour, or the guy you happened to be dating: “Incurably Romantic.
—
-The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides
The opening paragraph. To be published in full in October. DEAR WORLD, I AM VERY EXCITED. SERIOUSLY. NOW GO READ THE EXCERPT THAT WAS PUBLISHED IN THE NEW YORKER LAST YEAR. There is this line:
“Once released from 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.”
Hi Jeffrey Eugenides - The B level is my fifth favorite place in the Rock!!! Also, thanks for bequeathing literary taste to me in the form of Middlesex eight (dear god) years ago.
jeffrey eugenides, a.k.a. - semiotics, brown, & youth
Jeffrey Eugenides published a short story in The New Yorker early last month entitled Extreme Solitude, and I’ve finally come around to reading it. Mr. E. is a Brown alum, and the story itself is set at Brown. This piles on the laughter pretty thickly, especially when it comes to quotes like these:
Madeleine had met Leonard in an upper-level semiotics seminar taught by a renegade from the English department. Michael Zipperstein had arrived at Brown thirty-two years earlier filled with zeal for the New Criticism. He’d inculcated the habits of close reading and biography-free interpretation into three generations of students before taking a Road to Damascus sabbatical, in Paris, in 1975, where he’d met Roland Barthes at a dinner party and been converted, over duck cassoulet, to the new faith.
Nothing better (??) than hearing about the rise of semiotics in the 80s. A Lover’s Discourse, indeed. The entire story is so well-written and stunningly accurate.
It wasn’t only that this writing seemed beautiful to Madeleine. It wasn’t only that these opening sentences of Barthes’s made immediate sense, were readable, digestible. It wasn’t Madeleine’s relief at recognizing that here, at last, was a book she might write her final paper on. What made Madeleine sit up in bed was something closer to the reason she read books in the first place and had always loved them. Here was a sign that she wasn’t alone. Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling. In bed on a Friday night, wearing sweatpants and eating peanut butter from the jar, Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude.
It had to do with Leonard. With how she felt about him and how she couldn’t tell anyone. With how much she liked him and how little she knew about him. With how desperately she wanted to see him and how hard it was to do so.
After class that Wednesday, Madeleine and Leonard had ended up walking together to the Blue Room, the campus coffee shop.
I mean, isn’t that what it’s all about, in so many ways? Going to the Blue Room with a stranger-who-isn’t-really-a-stranger and getting a focaccia sandwich (how I missed them last year), braving some twitch-inducingly long line for reasons you don’t really want to admit? There goes young adulthood, variations on the same neurotic story. We read, and see ourselves in other people’s words in our most insecure moments. Tough love arrives when said critics/theorists are at the forefront of literary snobbery. Which is one of the problems I have with pretentious theory in the first place- the tone is patronizing to a fault, so how is that supposed to be persuasive? Seems rather poisonous to me. Thinking like Barthes, like Derrida, doesn’t guarantee you any happiness. Probably the opposite, really.
I actually laughed out loud at the end of this story. Eugenides is essentially boiling down one girl’s college experience to three terms: love, extreme solitude, and semiotics. And while that seems rather melodramatic, it’s all a bit of a farce, too, isn’t it? Really begs the question of how people can live with themselves while feeding off the awfulness of others and, in the process, making themselves even more awful.
