Goodreads Mobile | see what your friends are reading

Jan 14, 2012

Tatiana rated it:

Pretentious. I try to stay away from this word reviewing books, because too many of my favorites literary novels have been called that and it hurt. But The Marriage Plot is pretentious. And also pompous, elitist, privileged and self-important.

I just can't quite believe that the author who managed to make stories of 5 suicidal girls and a Greek hermaphrodite so compelling, could come up with something like The Marriage Plot and think it a worthy tale to tell. A rich, freshly graduated More...

39 comments like (100 people liked it)

Jan 31, 2012

Scott rated it:

After being given a crash course on semiotics, a brief history of relevant authors who were the catalyst for this form of literary criticism, and a reading list of authors whose novels adhere to the marriage plot, the reader is prepared to accept the conventionality of this unconventional novel.

Madeleine is pursued (manically, coyly) by two suitors, fellow soon-to be graduates of Brown University, whose personalities and backgrounds are not so much from opposite poles as they are fro More...

18 comments like (39 people liked it)

Jan 31, 2012

Sandybanks rated it:

BookFiendUSA: So, how was it? My GR friends’ reviews are all over the place on this one. How does it compare to Virgin Suicides or Middlesex?

SandyBanks1971: It’s…OK. Not badly written at all, but nothing incredible either. I can’t compare it with Eugenides’ earlier works, as I have never read anything by him before.

BookFiendUSA: Seriously? You’ve never even seen the Sofia Coppola movie?

SandyBanks1971: Nope. But I’ve read the synopses of the earlier books, an More...

15 comments like (9 people liked it)

Nov 25, 2011

Mindy rated it:

While there are passages that are beautiful in only the way Eugenides can write, they act more like flashes of brilliance in an otherwise dull and lazy novel.

The first part of the book shoves Semiotics into your brain and reads like the most terrible and awkwardly pretentious college courses that no one should ever have to suffer. And throughout it all, I kept feeling like this book was only for English majors (and maybe Philosophy majors), and had an agenda that did not involve tell More...

7 comments like (50 people liked it)

Feb 22, 2012

Christina rated it:

I am about 75 pages into this book and so far, I am not enjoying it.
It's about a college student in the U.S. who is writing a thesis about the way marriage plots are used in literature, mostly classics of which I haven't heard of too many of them. That seems to be the subplot. The main plot is about the student, Madeleine, and her "relationships" with her parents and these 2 love interests, Mitchell and Leonard.
I'm annoyed by the characters so far. It's almost as if they ar More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Feb 08, 2012

H rated it:

I only finished a quarter of this book before I had to return it to the library (express check-out). I think it should have been called The Marriage Plop. Granted, I'm no literary genius, just some schmuck with a science degree, so I don't get all the references, but beyond that I found each character hideously irritating and didn't really care how the story progressed or ended.

The book club consensus was as follows: Some of us liked it, most of us didn't, but EVERYONE was disappoin

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 21, 2011

Linda rated it:

I am enjoying the marriage plot. Set in a college town in the Eighties, it appeals to those of us who majored in literature or did post grad studies. Madeleine's love life is often hilarious, sometimes sad. Eugenides
writes great satire. Here is an excerpt:"Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth century novel. There More...

3 comments like (13 people liked it)

Dec 07, 2011

Stuart rated it:

Eugenides last book, Middlesex, was a fun read. Sure it had its clunky spots, but it was a warm-hearted thing with a solid Midwestern sensibility. The Marriage Plot is, on the other hand, overbaked, overwritten and just plain annoying. I guess if you took Jane Austen, put her in a time machine set to 1982, forced her to get an English degree loaded with classes that featured 1980s style (i.e., narcissistic and pointless) critical theory, and then forced her to get a MFA, you'd get this, a rea More...

4 comments like (27 people liked it)

Jan 02, 2012

Julie added it

Can't do it. Nope. Just can't. This is so over-written. I can't fathom spending 406 pages reading sentences like: "It smelled like the Amazonian rain forest, like putting your head between the legs of a native girl who had never heard of Christianity" (p 241). Pages and pages and pages of expository writing. And is there an adverb Eugenides doesn't like? He works so hard to make certain we know that he is all over the 80's iconic images- big hair, shoulder pads and parachute pants mak More...

13 comments like (22 people liked it)

Jan 07, 2012

Librarian rated it:

I am trying to decide if I really liked this book so much because I really liked it so much, or if I really liked it because it made me feel smart without really having to do anything. I fear it is the latter, but check back with me later on that. That said, the story is about the relationship between Mitchell who loves Madeleine who loves Leonard. I never figured out who Leonard loves. It's basically an intellectualized, sort of depressing rom-com, if that even makes any sense.

0 comments like (11 people liked it)

Nov 16, 2011

Jillwilson rated it:

This book deserves at least 3 and a half stars - I wish Good Reads had more differentiation in the ratings. I read this novel because of an article I read about the writer and this novel titled 'How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write ‘The Marriage Plot’'. I really liked the article and thought the book sounded good (http://www.themillions.com/2011/10/how-i...)

The article quotes from the actual text of the book:
"In Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee wit More...

7 comments like (6 people liked it)

Oct 29, 2011

Whitney rated it:

I'm convinced this is what happens if you combine a Whit Stillman script, Franny and Zooey, and a whole lot of beige. There's some beautiful writing here, unfortunately there's equally lot of bland writing. It doesn't help that the characters are dull either. At times, I couldn't believe that this was nine years in the making...yet at the same time I could. Let's just say the writing has a certain over-wrought feel to it.

Madeleine, the main heroine is a snooze. She's basically a stoc More...

13 comments like (53 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2012

Ed rated it:

Having been a big fan of Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex, it's needless to say that his latest, The Marriage Plot, immediately went on my virtual to-read-list. But despite making many a year-end best-of list and literary award-nominated, it almost as quickly tumbled down my list as heard very mixed things about it (including the inevitable "not as good" as Middlesex). It only made it back up my list when it was announced as one of the #1 seeds in the Tournament of Books competition. I More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Oct 09, 2011

switterbug (Betsey) rated it:

Kafka said, “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Stories that bore holes, blasting through the ice and earth rather than piling more on top of a parched, idle field, has the capacity to alter the reader, produce a chemical reaction and transgress the space that has already been traversed.

Eugenides’ revolutionary novel THE VIRGIN SUICIDES blew the dust off the languid spines of literature shelves and, although the context wasn’t new (suburbia, Baby Boom generation), More...

16 comments like (25 people liked it)

Aug 31, 2011

Mike added it

A hermaphrodite college student....no...a privileged college student starts a semiotics course and discovers.... sorry where was I?
A hermaphrodite semiotics student....this isn't working. I'm 40 pages in and each time a long Barthes quote appears my eyes glaze over.

Either it improved or my patience module kicked in. It's impossible for a Eugenides novel not to seduce you into its arms eventually.

2 comments like (15 people liked it)

Oct 26, 2011

Gerald rated it:

Masterful on many levels. At first I wasn't drawn to any of the three characters in the love triangle - Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell. Each seemed deeply flawed, and they are. Except you read along and find that Eugenides thinks we all are, just as deeply in our unique ways, and are none the lesser for it. That's the way people are, and the way life goes. We stumble through it, thinking we are somehow in control, and it's what happens nevertheless while we are furiously busy making other plan More...

6 comments like (32 people liked it)

Aug 31, 2011

dave rated it:

Having loved Middlesex so much, I'm having troubles talking about this book. I think I understand that Eugey was going for something--toying with old conventions used in the Victorian/Austen era. He puts enough literary history/theory in here to fell a horse, and with this, I think he's saying, "Just want to make you aware that I KNOW [that this is unoriginal]." He titled this book The Marriage Plot in reference to the well known plot structure in which a beautiful young woman must cho More...

10 comments like (18 people liked it)

Feb 04, 2012

Tomi-Ann rated it:

Oh gosh, I've been eagerly anticipating Eugenides next book, as I loved, loved, loved Middlesex. The wait was worth it. Perhaps a full half of why I loved this read so much was the fact that I was transported back to the early 80's, when both the characters and I myself, were in college, and when semiotics hit the scene in the study of literature. I, like Madeleine, loved to read (and still do). But I remember opting out of Comp Lit as my major because I couldn't handle the ways semiotics pretty More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jan 18, 2012

Kate rated it:

I started out really enjoying the literary theory-nerd stuff as stated above. However, I never really connected to the characters.

I've been pondering why and I think it mainly has to do with voice. The voices of Eugenides' first two novels were so compelling: "The Virgin Suicides" is told in the plural third person from the point of view of the boys of a town; and the "Middlesex" voice of Cal is kind of like omniscient first person that telescopes in an More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Feb 06, 2012

Sara rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 30, 2011

lana rated it:

I am not yet certain what to say about this one, considering the possible acres of subtext. Eugenides is taking on the trope of the marriage plot by writing one, modernized for college and the 1980s. Reading the first half of the book felt like going back to college, with the overblown, self-important theorizing and grandiose eloquence only achievable by young academics with everything to prove. I thought of reading Ovid in school, the way he seemed to reference just to prove he'd read the mater More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

Jan 06, 2012

Gary rated it:

To compare this to Middlesex is a mistake-akin to comparing grand opera to an intimate chamber piece. This book succeeds because it takes the structure and theme of a nineteenth century novel and turns them upside down. The love triangle which drives the plot reminds me of the Freudian view of self. At its core is Madeleine(ego), who has spent her time consuming stories about love without absorbing their lessons about life. She falls hard for Leonard(id)and enters into a permanent relationship w More...

8 comments like (7 people liked it)

Dec 21, 2011

Eric rated it:

In the Regency and Victorian periods, English novels usually had a "marriage plot", in which the heroine dealt with choosing between marrying one of two men, each having different personality characteristics. This book is an update and a deconstruction that type of plot.

There's a love triangle, in which Madeleine, a lit major, chooses between Mitchell, a soul-searching religious studies major, and Leonard, a troubled biology major. The action takes place in the early eightie More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Aug 31, 2011

Emily rated it:

Though I have been a bookseller for more years than I'm willing to confess, I have somehow never read Jeffrey Eugenides, despite his Pulitzer Prize and the fact that The Virgin Suicides is the favorite novel of one of my favorite sales reps (shout-out to Michael Kindness!). It's not that I was actively not reading Eugenides. I just hadn't gotten around to it yet. Enter his new book this October from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux called The Marriage Plot, which my bookstore is considering for its More...

2 comments like (16 people liked it)

Feb 18, 2012

Meave rated it:

It's a really easy read. Eugenides is a good writer, like every sentence is so solid, you can just fall into the book. And also it's better than Freedom, speaking of Big Books About American Marriages (or not). It's nice to feel comfortable in a story, though that's a very personal reaction. I say "I felt so comfortable in it," but people of other ages/races/genders in different socio-economic brackets might feel differently, which is fine. I don't want to assume that my "universa More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 31, 2012

Lavinia rated it:

I liked Middlesex so much that I promised myself I was going to read everything Eugenides wrote / will write, therefore The Marriage Plot is the first book I've ever pre-ordered. I loved it from one end to the other; it's the kind of book you'd read in bed in one weekend and the only reason I haven't finished it earlier was my hectic programme and even though I carried my reader with me every day, I was still unable to read more than a few pages a night.

Did I mention how much I loved More...

5 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 10, 2012

Julie (Klickitat) rated it:

3.5 stars. (I would rate the first half 4 stars, not so much for the plot or the sad sack characters but for the engaging and sharp writing. But the last half is a bit of a let-down (I swear I felt Eugenides' interest waning) and only 3 stars. Although I must say, he does an excellent job writing in a manic's voice.)

(Mild SPOILERS.)

This book is totally a re-staging of Middlemarch but in reverse (i.e. unhappy marriage at the end, not the beginning). Given Madeleine's inter More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 14, 2011

Tee rated it:

Engaging enough that I finished reading it but it was good not great. I'm not sure whether it is the mood I am as of late; my moods seem to have a large play on how I read and rate books. Duh! you might say but I've realised that I can re-read a book that I initially loathed, only to turn around and think it's the bees knees at a different time in my life. Or usually, vice versa. I'm not sure whether my hesitations in loving this book comes from me having to distance myself from it a little; to More...

2 comments like (3 people liked it)

Nov 15, 2011

Hannah rated it:

Dang, well, I guess it would be hard to top Middlesex but this just felt so much more like Virgin Suicides than I was anticipating. Skinnier story line, less at stake. Oh to be young and feel the sharp sting of love, said Dumbledore. But by then he was quite old. Quite quite quite quite old.

Anyway I am not saying don't read it.

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Nov 22, 2011

Susan rated it:

Eugenides is such a good writer; this novel looks at literature, marriage love, our educational system and ties it up neatly in a clever package. 'Liked this more than Middlesex.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)