Regrettably, the reader never learn much about how or why Madeline values the classic Victorian romances, although the title for her final essay is a killer: ‘I Thought You’d Never Ask: Some Thoughts on the Marriage Plot’. But, this being the 1980s, and the height of the trend for post-structural and postmodern philosophy, Eugenides has Madeleine write her senior thesis on the ‘marriage plot’: the narrative principle of so many nineteenth-century novels, in which the author’s objective is to marry off the characters. Mitchell and Leonard (essentially her suitors) study religion and science respectively and hail from humbler backgrounds. Madeleine, the novel’s archetypal ingenue, is an English major from a prosperous family in New Jersey. The three central characters are each getting to grips with Derrida’s theories of deconstruction while also attempting the even more complex business of deconstructing their desires. It’s the eighties, and a cast of bright, go-getting young Ivy Leaguers are on the verge of graduation. Middlesex was a clever queering of the familial saga/generational epic, while this novel is a self-consciously conventional, ‘straight’ narrative. However, readers hoping for a similar multi-generational epic will be surprised by The Marriage Plot. It has been a long wait between books for fans of Jeffrey Eugenides: his door-stopper of a novel Middlesex won the Pulitzer Prize back in 2002.
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