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    The Marriage Plot: A Novel
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    The Marriage Plot: A Novel
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    The Marriage Plot: A Novel
    Audiobook15 hours

    The Marriage Plot: A Novel

    Written by Jeffrey Eugenides

    Narrated by David Pittu

    3.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    A New York Times Notable Book of 2011
    A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011
    A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title
    One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011
    A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title
    One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011

    It's the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateOct 11, 2011
    ISBN9781427213099
    Unavailable
    The Marriage Plot: A Novel
    Author

    Jeffrey Eugenides

    Jeffrey Eugenides is the author of three novels. His first, The Virgin Suicides (1993), is now considered a modern classic. Middlesex (2002) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and both Middlesex and The Marriage Plot (2011) were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Fresh Complaint, a collection of short stories, was published in 2017. He is a member both of The American Academy of Arts and Letters and The American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

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    Reviews for The Marriage Plot

    3.5/5

    1,740 ratings174 reviews

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    • 4/5
      In the spring of 1982, Madeline (Maddie) Hanna is about to graduate from Brown University with a degree in English literature. She has been especially drawn to the writing of Austen, Eliot, and James, with their novels based on ?marriage plots.? Also graduating is Mitchell Grammaticus, a religious studies major who plans to seek enlightenment?or at least a short-term research job?in India. Maddie and Mitchell dated briefly as sophomores, but she broke up with him because he wanted a more serious relationship than she was ready for. Mitchell still pines after Maddie, while she is in love with Leonard Bankhead, a brilliant but seriously disturbed physics major who is also graduating and with whom Maddie had an intense fling during the winter of their senior year.?The Marriage Plot? traces the lives of Maddie, Mitchell, and Leonard through the years just following graduation. The books addresses big themes, one of which is the difficulty of finding one?s way in the world, even for young adults who, with a degree from an Ivy League university, would appear to have it made. Mitchell tries?and fails spectacularly?to find grace while serving at Mother Teresa?s Missionary of Charity in Calcutta. Maddie tries, and fails, to play the role of supportive wife to Leonard, who in turn struggles and fails to capitalize on his scientific genius while coping with manic-depression.Another theme of ?The Marriage Plot? is the parallel between religiosity and insanity. In a particularly explicit example of this, while traveling in India, Mitchell meets a devotee of the spiritual leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, who tells him, matter-of-factly, that ?[p]eople levitate.? Much later, after Mitchell has returned to the US and has run into Maddie and Leonard at a party in New York, Leonard, now seriously depressed, describes to Mitchell an experience he had in Europe on his honeymoon, where he ?was looking up into the starry sky when suddenly he had the feeling that he could lift off into space, if he wanted to, [and] as soon as the idea occurred to him, it . . . happened: he was suddenly in space, floating past the planet Saturn.?A third theme involves perspectives on class and wealth. Eugenides depicts the contrast between upper and working class Americans (Maddie and Mitchell), and then puts it in context by depicting the difference between Mitchell and the extremely poor residents of Calcutta he meets.?The Marriage Plot? is very well written: Maddie is certainly channeling Eugenides when she says that ?a writer should work harder writing a book than [the reader does} reading it.? But in the end, ?The Marriage Plot? is not wholly satisfying. In contrast to ?Middlesex,? which had an expansive story spanning decades and history that impacted millions of people, ?The Marriage Plot? at times feel claustrophobic. Perhaps that?s because the three main characters are each experiencing their own forms of claustrophobia: Mitchell unable to escape the bounds of his corporeality to achieve the enlightenment he so seeks, Maddie unable to escape the bounds of a bad marriage, and Leonard unable to escape the bounds of his broken mind.
    • 4/5
      15 audio discsMarch ABC book group selection"Offering a wholly new approach to the classic love story, this is an intimate meditation on the quests—romantic and otherwise—that confound and propel us"Madeleine Hanna.....Leonard Bankhead....Mitchell GrammaticusIn journal style, members of this triangle graduate from Brown, and face events that cause them to re evaluate life again and again.The author presents them with understanding and affection.Doing this in audio was a hoot!These characters were so well presented.
    • 3/5
      I would have liked a little bit more about literature and a little bit less about the guy with a mental illnes.
    • 4/5
      Thoroughly enjoyable if you went to a northeast liberal arts college. Otherwise will certainly come off as snobbish and bobo intellectual.
    • 3/5
      Finally! After slightly more than a month, I've finished this!

      It started off mind-numbingly slow, couldn't get myself to continue. Initially, had trouble connecting with any of the characters but they became to grow halfway through and became more interesting. Felt that the end came too soon. After I finished with the book, I began to reflect back on the first half, it wasn't THAT bad as I thought it was when I was reading it. Lots of thinking and reflection. Good if you have a reading buddy or a book club to discuss while you read The Marriage Plot.

      Lots of reviews seem to compare with his other works which I thought was unfair, so no comparing from me. I might give this book another go, try to dig deeper and ponder the story.

      I give it 3.5 stars.
    • 4/5
      Although this book lagged a bit in places, I enjoyed it. I thought the ending was wonderful, and for me, unexpected. Not quite up to the quality of "Middlesex" but good nonetheless.
    • 5/5
      Quality, not quantity. This is true for authors such as Jeffrey Eugenides. His third novel, The Marriage Plot, is another high-quality offering and did not disappoint.It takes place in the 1980, and focuses on the lives of three students finishing up college: Madeline, an English major; Leonard, who is manic-depressive (the term used in the book, probably because "bi-polar" wasn't yet more commonly used); and Mitchell, who is in love with Madeline. Madeline isn't in love with Mitchell but instead loves Leonard. This is not a simplistic love-triangle story even with the manic-depressive angle. Being simplistic isn't Eugenide's style. I found this novel richly complex and this was one of the very, very few books in 2013 that I was able to read straight through (as opposed to putting down and picking up at a later time) and actually finish. What keeps me from giving this novel a "perfect 5-star" rating is the bit of over-intellectual flavor in the beginning -- yes, I know it was a college setting, but it was just a tiny bit over the top. Otherwise, this was a fantastic book that will stay with me for a long time.
    • 4/5
      I was thoroughly enjoying the story until Eugenides incorrectly uses the title "Seeds of Temptation" for a Thomas Merton book that Mitchel brings along only to discover that there is also a factual error of the same sort in the printed version of the book. Such a mistake seems unprofessional on the part of both the publisher and the writer.

      That being said, it's been something like 7 years since Middlesex was in paperback and since I read it so I don't exactly remember what I loved so much about it. This was an enjoyable and easy book and of course saddens me so much being a happily married woman (a Stage 2?). I found myself remembering my own days of Undergrad and what it was like to be newly in love with my now husband.

      A good read especially if you were an English Major in College.
    • 4/5
      This substantial and in a lot of ways traditional novel focuses on the interior lives of 3 university students and their post graduation lives - detailed and thoughtful exploration of academic pursuits, spiritual exploration, relationships, living with mental illness. I wonder if you have to have lived a similar kind of life to like this book. I found it very readable but can see why others might find the characters too pretentious to enjoy.
    • 4/5
      Jeffrey Eugenides latest novel and the most relatable one. Eugenides it always worth reading, but here you can find three people in an unfortunate ménage à trois. It's bare humanity in the classiest way.
    • 3/5
      Jeffrey Eugenides creates realistic characters because he paints a full canvas for them--you learn about their families, their history, their childhoods, their dreams and beliefs. And he does this for all three of the main characters here. The problem is, nothing much actually happens. Anyone who has gone to college will find something to relate to with these college-age protagonists--either because you see some of yourself or the people you met while you were there--but ultimately, I had a hard time caring what actually happened to any of them.
    • 3/5
      Literary novel about three twenty-somethings before, during, and just after graduating from Brown University in the 1980s. Madeleine is in love with Leonard, who suffers from bipolar disorder. Mitchell is in love with Madeleine. Madeleine views Mitchell purely as a friend. Madeleine is majoring in nineteenth century literature. Leonard is studying biology. Mitchell’s focus is on philosophy and religious studies.

      The storyline follows the lives of these three main characters. The structure is unusual. It begins in the middle (at university) and then relates what happened to each character before and after. Madeleine’s section documents a privileged young woman who lacks direction. Leonard’s section provides the reader a glimpse of what it might be like to live with bipolar disorder. Mitchell’s section portrays a search for deeper meaning through travels and religion.

      This book is all over the place. It contains lots of ingredients, probably too many – relationship dynamics, religion, mental health, sex, college life, career choices, intellectual sparring, finding oneself, and growing up. There are a few esoteric diversions into semiotics and the reproductive habits of yeast. Mother Theresa even makes an appearance.

      It is purportedly a modern update to the nineteenth century novels (Jane Austen, Henry James) that contained a “marriage plot” where the goal for a woman of the time was to get married. But this theme is ignored through large portions of this novel. To me, it was more about the impact of mental illness on a relationship.

      I had previously read Middlesex and loved it, so I had high expectations. This book is much less successful. I enjoyed the literary references but the updating of the “marriage plot” to today’s world did not quite work for me.
    • 1/5
      The Marriage Plot was one of the big books of last fall. You've probably seen it on the best-seller display at your favorite bookstore or library. I contemplated reading it, but then it dropped further down on my "maybe" list and I eventually forgot about it until the new book group that I joined this year chose it as our second book. (Our first book was A Discovery of Witches, which I read and loved last spring.)

      So I gave The Marriage Plot the old college try. At first I enjoyed it, but pretty quickly started losing interest. I liked the writing, but the characters (and plot) didn't interest me and that's pretty much a must for me. I don't have to like the characters, but they do have to be compelling for some reason, any reason, to keep me reading. The characters in this novel lacked blood. I just couldn't force myself to keep reading and threw in the towel.

      The novel had some good moments, such as the scene when, after a semiotics class, Madeleine runs into the library and pulls a literary classic off the shelf "to restore herself to sanity.” The passage goes on,

      "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."

      After suffering through literary theory classes myself in the late 80s, I could relate.

      The other members of my book group gave it a 3/5 rating: they admired the writing, but the story and/or characters didn't grab them.

      Let me end by sharing with you a revealing detail about the particular library copy I was reading. I was struck by the number of dog-eared pages in this edition, particularly considering this is still a hot title with a lengthy waiting list at the library and not a book that's been around for decades or even a few years:

      --Between pages 3-82 there are 11 dog-eared pages. The book starts on page 3.
      --Between pages 83-406 there are exactly 0 dog-eared pages. Either people found bookmarks to use, or I can safely take it as a sign that I'm not the only one who gave up on this one.
    • 3/5
      After reading Middlesex, I had high hopes for this one. Maybe too high. I didn't find much likable about any of the characters and the only reason I stuck with it is that I expected it to be brilliant. It just wasn't. I'm even the same age as the protagonists (graduated in 1982) and I still couldn't relate to them.
    • 1/5
      Ugh... why? Jeffrey Eugenides' first book was about five suicidal sisters. His second was a Bildungsroman about an intersex person. His third is about... college grads trying to decide what to do with their lives. Gah, if I wanted a book like that, I'd write my memoirs. (And be completely unsurprised when no one read them.)

      First we meet Madeleine, an English major at Brown University. She is a bit of an oddity because a) she likes to read and b) she likes "unfashionable" authors like Austen, James, Eliot, and Wharton. She is very attractive, as evidenced by the men around her finding her attractive. Eugenides spends pages and pages trying to convince you how special Madeleine is. (One sign is that she uses looseleaf tea instead of teabags.) The resulting portrait is of a pretty, sweet, naive, and dull young woman.

      Despite being graced with more personality, the two male leads are not much better. Leonard is a budding scientist struggling with bipolar disorder. While his disease certainly makes him more sympathetic, it is no excuse for the way he treats Madeleine. (Madeleine pretty much puts up with his emotional abuse because the sex is so great.) Mitchell, a religious studies major, is a typical Nice Guy - the guy who becomes friends with you because he wants to fuck you. Unlike most love triangles, there is no reason to "ship" one pairing over the other.

      The worst offense The Marriage Plot commits is that it has absolutely nothing new to say. I really hope that Eugenides didn't think he was being transgressive with the ending, where Madeleine rejects both suitors and goes to graduate school. The only way that ending would have been revolutionary is if it had happened in The Twilight Saga.
    • 4/5
      Jeffrey Eugenides' work has been on my literary radar for several years now, probably because he's gotten so much good press. And now, having read THE MARRIAGE PLOT (2011), I can see why. Eugenides is just a damn good writer. But his style, his "setting-up" of the storyline and the presenting of his characters' back stories, can be so complex and dense with details and data, that it can be intimidating and frustrating to the reader. In fact I almost gave up on this book about halfway through it, thinking, C'MON, will ya? Get on with the STORY! And thank goodness, he finally did, albeit still sticking with his particular ornate style and frequent forays off to the side. Because at its heart, the plot is a fairly simple one. It's a love triangle set in the early 1980s between three newly minted college graduates of Brown - Leonard, Madeline and Mitchell, all incredibly gifted and intelligent. Then throw some mental illness into the mix, Leonard's manic depression, the fly in the ointment of his scientific genius and the charisma that draws Madeline, a "Victorianist" lit major. And there's Mitchell, a student of comparative religion with a chronic unrequited crush on Madeline, who travels to India where he volunteers in Mother Teresa's hospital for the dying. So we have then a thick, rich stew of science, history, world religions, literature, other cultures ad more. There's even a quick course on the sex life of yeast, as Leonard explains it to Madeline's Brahmin mother when she intrudes into his summer fellowship lab work on Cape Cod. So THE MARRIAGE PLOT is, basically an "it's complicated" kind of love story of the eighties, a 400-page opus that really gets rolling in the second half. I'm glad I stuck with it. And I loved the ending. Very highly recommended. (I think I have an old copy of MIDDLESEX around here somewhere. I'll keep it handy for the next time I have a Eugenides itch.)- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book but I also struggled with it. The first part reads like a literature class which was a little difficult for me to follow. I kept wondering if I had reverted back to my undergrad days. I kept slugging through because this is supposed to be one of the best books of 2011 and I wanted to see what all the hype was about.

      The book picked up a little and then slowed down ( at least for me) and it took me a lot longer to finish it because some parts were tedius to read. I enjoyed most of the characters but fount Mitchell's narrative to be rather slow. I found Madeline a little infuriating, but I'm sure I was too when I was 21.

      Overall, I enjoyed the book but I also have to say that I am glad to be done with it.
    • 3/5
      A lot more "normal" than The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. The absence of strangeness and epicness made this book the least enjoyable for me.
    • 2/5
      The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides Oxford University Press meets Mills and Boon meets Black Nite Crash.

      What was all the fuss about?
    • 3/5
      Eugenides has a wonderful way with words, but I was annoyed by all 3 main characters, and most of the supporting ones. The descriptions of the psych unit and the homeless shelter in India was fascinating, but Maddy really irked me with her desire to save anyone but herself until the very end of the book.

      Also feel like it was overhyped. Kind of like Slumdog Millionaire once I got around to seeing it.
    • 4/5
      I love Jeffrey Eugenides. Middlesex is one of my top top top books ever and this was not that... but it was still a great book. Would I ever want to read it again? Hmmmm, maybe this is more of a 3.5 but anyway, it's still a big, thick, luscious tome with fully developed characters and so much detail that reading it feels like watching a movie with every scene available for pause during playback. I loved being inside this work and have no idea how Eugenides manages to get inside the head, heart and body of a college-aged female with such immersion. He's amazing.
    • 3/5
      During the first half, this book felt as though Eugenides had left his oodles of research done for "Middlesex", read some of Donna Tartt's "The Secret History", some Bret Easton Ellis and really dissected and mulled over Jonathan Franzen's "Freedom".

      The second half had more flesh, yet also more pulp.

      At the same time, this book is very well-written, and by that I mean the author has a firm grip on rhythm, colouring his language and keeping parts suspenseful. Friendships and some love feels real.

      On the other hand, I'll say it's a lot of research into biology - cells - which feels a bit asperger-ish. We get the metaphors; I think. It could have used a firmer grip and more editing.

      Kudos to Eugenides for name-dropping "The Paris Review".
    • 3/5
      This is definitely not the best novel Mr. Eugenides has written. It's a love triangle involving college students....a good enough story, but nothing nearly as captivating as his earlier subjects. And I found that the author went into too much detail about the contents of the courses the students were taking...if I want to understand deconstructionism, I'll find a nonfiction book to explain it to me.
    • 3/5
      Although there were some great passages, the novel as a whole fails for me. Over-written and under edited.
    • 2/5
      All I can say is I'm not sure why everyone loved this book.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this more than I expected to based on my inability to even finish Middlesex. The three characters really annoyed me but the story line was fantastically real. I wasn't a fan of how pretentious the characters were especially in regards to how intellectual they found themselves to be and I wonder how much of it was character development and how much of it was Eugenides own voice. Regardless I can't deny that he is a wonderful author and his writing style and plot development are beautiful. This book has convinced me to give Middlesex another shot.
    • 3/5
      I liked the first third of Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Marriage Plot," but then, I don't know what happened as the story sort of went off the rails and became fairly boring for the remainder of the book.The novel tells the story of Madeleine Hanna and the love triangle she is unconvincingly involved in with hunky yet mentally ill Leonard and the grating, religious character of Mitchell. I very much liked the story when it was focused on the college years -- perhaps because it was reflective of my own college experience in some ways. However, once the trio of characters graduates, the story just grinds along and doesn't really go anywhere. I've liked other books by Eugenides, so I was surprised I didn't enjoy this one more.
    • 4/5
      Very enjoyable but not as good as Middlesex.
    • 2/5
      This was terrible. I tried to read the whole thing because I LOVED [Middlesex] by the same author and this is on the 1001 books to read before you die list. But it was just awful. Horribly pretentious, self-involved, messed up characters, and a boring and predictable plot/character interactions.I skimmed the last 50 pages and it just got more ridiculous. Isn't it surprising when an author can write one book you love and one you think is awful?
    • 2/5
      Yet another highly praised book that I just didn't like. The characters weren't people I had any empathy for or cared about in any way, shape or form. Every time I started getting into the storytelling itself the author would switch locations and take the story off on another tangent.
      A very unenjoyable read and another head scratcher as regards to what makes critics praise books that to me seem average or below average.