The biggest complaint I have heard about this book is that it's too "pretentious". But it's a book about three university students in their final year of college and in the year right after they graduate. So saying the book is "pretentious", in my opinion, is the same as saying the book is authentic, which I guess must be a compliment.

In fact, there is so much authenticity in the book that sometimes I start seeing people around me going into the book as characters. The way that the characters converse with each other is the same way that my friends and I converse with each other. The worries that the characters have are the same worries that my friends and I have. My friends and I, as students in their final year of college, are just like the characters in the book, who assume just because you have learned something, you must also know that something; and just because you know that something, that something must therefore be true, until life dumps the biggest bucket of cold water onto your head and tells you that no amount of knowledge or "truths" can prepare you for the surprises that life has for you.

Unlike Blue Nights and The Sense of an Ending - which I think would have benefited me much more if I had not read them as such a young age, The Marriage Plot - like The Art of Fielding could not have come to me at a more appropriate time.