Love triangles are about as common on college campuses as empty plastic cups.
In The Marriage Plot, a new work of fiction by Jeffrey Eugendies (The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex), we are treated to an inside view of one of these fragile triangles.
Madeleine is about to graduate from college. Though she has been pursued since freshman year by Mitchell, she ends up dating depressed, brilliant Leonard.
Through adept flashbacks and a complicated, unraveling plot, Eugenides paints a hopeful picture of a young woman finding herself.
Rich with literary references (including a reoccurring reference to one of my favorite books, J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey), The Marriage Plot continues a tradition of transcendent books sent on college campuses.
Less reliant on the party scene than Tom Wolfe’s wonderful I Am Charlotte Simmons, The Marriage Plot will still resonate with college students, present and past.
The reader comes to care for these characters, to wish that they would make the right decisions and mostly that they would be good to one another. The subject matter is vast–complicated relationship and sexual issues, marriage, manic depression and the immediate post-college onset of adulthood–and treated carefully in Eugendies deft hands.
The Marriage Plot is a worthy follow up to 2002′s excellent, Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex.
