Book Review: 'The Marriage Plot' by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides updates the time-honored theme of searching for the ideal marriage partner

These days it’s the billionaire boyfriend or the rockstar, but the arc of the romantic love story is much the same as it was in Jane Austen’s era:

If she doesn’t get the guy, she’s toast.

I wrote this review years ago and posted it on Goodreads. It has stimulated a long discussion thread and 242 Likes. This book and The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes have made me think about thinking more than perhaps any others.

A theory of semiotics suggests that we wouldn't have notions of romantic love if we hadn't been told stories about 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 plans, or simply fretting about making up our minds.

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