Jeffrey Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

You wouldn’t want to be a girl in a Jeffrey Eugenides novel. Never can there be doubt about the fate of the five sisters in his debut, The Virgin Suicides. The narrator of Middlesex, his Pulitzer-winning follow-up, is raised as a daughter but runs away at age 14 to live as a man. Madeleine Hanna, a 22-year-old Ivy Leaguer and the female lead in The Marriage Plot, seems, by contrast, relatively unscathed by her experience of her teenage years in Cold War-era suburbia. Yet it’s no surprise when she writes a term paper on literature and “the (Strictly Limited) Sphere of the Feminine”, because that sounds a lot like Eugenides’ own theme. Faced with becoming women, his girls – stared at, drooled over, prodded and poked – would rather opt out.

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It's a worrying idea, but Eugenides likes to make us laugh – those brackets in Madeleine's essay title – which is why his new novel, only his third since 1993, arrives in the guise of a mild romantic comedy. It traces the post-university reverberations of an on-campus love triangle over a three-year stretch in the Eighties. There is a recession, and a boom in a new academic discipline known as Theory. "Derrida is my absolute god!," says Madeleine's roommate. Madeleine, who prefers Daniel Deronda, worries about how she'd pronounce Roland Barthes' surname if asked to speak in her semiotics seminar. The nub of this well-worn satire is obvious: maybe these kids are wasting their time, but unemployment's at 10 per cent and rising, so what else can they do?

Semiotics 211 is where Madeleine meets manic biology student Leonard Bankhead. Excited corners of the internet will tell you that tobacco-chewing, bandanna-clad, omnivorously-read Leonard is an avatar of David Foster Wallace. You need not be a crank to credit the notion – already a sharp-eyed blogger has shown that the novel lifts at least one line of speech from a mid-Nineties newspaper profile of Wallace – but perhaps only a mystic could work out why Eugenides would do such a thing, or what difference it makes.

Madeleine doesn’t know Leonard is ill until graduation day – when the novel begins – by which time they’ve split up, because he refuses to say “I love you” (he shows her what Barthes says about the phrase). The snub is forgotten when she discovers that he’s been admitted to hospital after a breakdown. More or less his helpmate, she follows him, without a job of her own, to the coastal apartment that is the perk of Leonard’s year-long medical research fellowship, where they conduct a brief, intense affair, which culminates in a spectacular wipeout on their honeymoon in Monte Carlo.

On the other side of the love triangle is a theology major, Mitchell, who has the book’s two funniest lines (he just happens to be Detroit-born of Greek descent, like Eugenides). He lusts after Madeleine from afar, having once blown his chance to make a move at a Thanksgiving sleepover. She claims not to fancy him, but strings him along once in a while. The do-you-don’t-you business thickens with an exchange of letters during his gap-year quest for enlightenment in Calcutta. Madeleine’s monied parents adore Mitchell. They’re not so keen on Leonard, particularly once their spiteful elder daughter, Ally, saddled with a baby and a bad match of her own, blabs about the pills left lying around in the Bankhead bathroom.

Because Eugenides writes well, most of this is great fun to read about, although The Marriage Plot is more reined-in than his previous books. High literary ostentation marks both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex: a phrase in one about "the aureolae of street lights" reappears in the other ("yellow globes of streetlamps glow, aureoled in the mist"). Nothing is aureoled in The Marriage Plot. In Middlesex, "epic" means Homer; here it means a good house party.

Stylistically, control is the watchword. Period markers (Hill Street Blues, Chris Evert, the Walkman) are rare and unobtrusive, defying the trend for Eighties-set novels to liberally scatter cultural references. When Eugenides ventures his one newsy analogy – mapping war in Lebanon onto Madeleine's marital strife – he does so with the excuse that a character is getting drunk ("after his second ... Mitchell was inspired to draw comparisons"). Similes are more than decorative: when we're told that, for Madeleine, "reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights", it lets us know what she does in her spare time.

If Eugenides occasionally breaks off narrating from the perspective of his cast, it’s because of that need to get a laugh. Madeleine, teased by Ally for being chubbier at Christmas than when she set off for university, pays “no attention, quietly slicing and eating the first of the fifty-seven grapefruits she subsisted on until New Year’s”. Leonard, sunk in gloom, thinks it’s “time to show some backbone and power up. This he achieved by collapsing slowly sideways until he was curled foetally across the sofa.” The sudden shifts in point of view that these quips entail seem at times to compromise the novel’s emotional undertow.

There are longueurs. Probably the dullest is a sequence about Leonard’s past. He submits that he’s “messed up biologically because of my genetics and psychologically because of my parents”, which is shown to be true, at length. Just when you feel you might zone out, there’s a crescendo to parallel Leonard’s skyrocketing mood, as he giddily chances his arm with a tight-sweatered 16-year-old behind the counter of a sweet shop – a prelude to the novel’s pivotal act.

Eugenides knows what he's doing with pace here. A late passage makes sure we know he knows: watching her husband heal, Madeleine thinks, is "like ploughing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept on getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure".

But that isn't the only reason Eugenides itemises the failings of Leonard's parents. His novels tend to run backwards: first they tell you what happened – as in the title of his debut – then they try to explain it. "Living sends a person not into the future but back into the past," muses Cal/Calliope in Middlesex. An irony of that book is that it turns on the protagonist's choice of identity, yet devotes itself to his Greek heritage and repudiated girlhood. Here, that same retroactive structure traps the cast in the bubble of adolescence. You have to keep reminding yourself that they're adults.

I think that's the point. Something which seems to bug Eugenides, with his insider-outsider privilege, is the American idea "that life is about the pursuit of happiness" (Middlesex). He has someone condemn it in every book. "You're born in America," a Christian evangelist tells Mitchell. "You grow up and what do they tell you? They tell you that you have a right to the pursuit of happiness. And that the way to be happy is to get a lot of nice stuff, right? I did that ... I thought that the world revolved around me. But guess what? It doesn't." Madeleine is never allowed to get this: a breeze blows over the "Katharine Hepburn-ish cheekbones" of her face, and she thinks it's because the wind is "personally interested in her". She sees herself "as being the one in a troop of girls a writer might write a book about".

The irony runs deep. If you’re inclined to think a rich young woman’s heartache can’t rival the pathos of Calliope and the Lisbon sisters, perhaps that’s just because Eugenides has found a quieter register in which to make his point. “You need to grow up”, Madeleine’s sister tells her. In the opening pages, waiting for her parents, she feels like a “gawky seventh-grader”. Post-Monte Carlo honeymoon, we’re told that she is happiest being “able to will herself back to girlhood” in the company of friends made as a child (“the earlier and dippier they were, the better”).

This is four pages from the end: it doesn’t leave much time for growth. Bankrolled by her father, who sooner or later supports all the main characters, and one of the minor ones (that’s recession for you), Madeleine finishes the novel, accepting an offer of postgraduate study. Of course, Americans call this going back to school.

Anthony Cummins is a freelance fiction reviewer in London.