Book: The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

There are three main characters: Madeleine, Mitchell and Leonard who all graduate from Brown in 1982, and this novel is about their first year after graduation. Mitchell and Leonard are in love with Madeleine. Both are intelligent but with very different personalities. The author writes with that facile grace that seems effortless but probably isn't. The reader gets the nuances and allusions of the early 1980s in clever, often funny, paragraphs about the students with the carelessness and freedom and self absorption of that age. He writes of their respective childhoods, their parents and the immediate few weeks leading to graduation day. It is all easy to read, entertaining, fun....

But then the narrative matures as these kids leave the coziness of the campus for the larger world. Mitchell takes off for Europe and Asia, trying to forget Madeleine, but also seriously seeking a spiritual path. Madeleine goes with Leonard to Cape Cod where he has a biology fellowship, and they live there for several months.

Leonard, it turns out, is manic-depressive, and reading about his struggles is reason enough to read this book. I felt ashamed for the times I have been dismissive of mental illness...not totally, but often enough, thinking about mentally ill individuals in generic simplistic ways.

The book was also satisfying because it had a good ending in that it was time to stop this particular narrative even though life would continue for the characters. Often books seem to have a flat, uninspired ending as though the author doesn't understand denouement.

Few examples of Eugenides' writing:

"And then Phyllida [Madeleine's mother] was there, with a bellman in tow, her clothes neat and her hair in place. Everything Madeline hated about her mother--her imperturbable rectitude, her lack of visible emotion--was exactly what Madeline needed at the moment."

"They stood at the subway entrance, one of the hugging, crying couples in New York, ignored by everyone passing by, granted perfect privacy in the middle of a teeming city on a hot summer night."

Mitchell goes to Quaker Meetings: "As for Mitchell, he didn't say anything at the Meetings. The Spirit didn't move him to speak. He sat on the bench, enjoying the stillness of the morning and the musty scent of the Meeting House. But he didn't feel entitled to illumination."

So while Eugenides can write very well and tells a good story, he also gives us something to think about beyond the material world of his compelling characters.