Great discussion last night even though we missed out on a key contributor, who despite heroic efforts to finish the book caught the tail end of the cold bug that's been running rampant in our department, *and* we had a minor run-in with a surly conference goer hording bar tables and a discombobulated bartender. Still, we soldiered on, buoyed by Prosecco, vino, and tea, and had a fabulous discussion.
This post will mostly serve as a placeholder -- let's put our discussion in the comments if that works for everyone. Happy reading!
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Posting great comments from Matt:
Part 1
General Thoughts
I had high expectations from reading “Middlesex,” and “The Marriage Plot” disappointed me. Mostly, I didn’t care for any of the characters. I did enjoy a number of scenes, especially the college ones, but that the best and most thought-provoking parts were quotes from Roland Barthes and explorations of other writers’ ideas isn’t saying much. But my to-read list got much longer.
Setting
Naturally I enjoyed all the RI references – Cable Car cinema, Narragansett beer, Buddy Cianci. Madeleine’s graduation-day walk around College Hill was fun to read … probably an intentional echo of “Ulysses” in the way it lists all the streets and turns she takes. Maybe Paris & Calcutta were rendered less vividly, but I also like the scenes that took place abroad.
The references to 70s/80s pop culture sometimes seemed awkwardly inserted. College life does not seem to have changed. Did the phrase “drop trou” really exist back then?
The publisher’s attempt to tie this era in with our own (recession, high unemployment rate) is a bit misleading, considering these particular characters. Madeleine comes from a well-off family and has nothing to worry about; she can ride out the recession in grad school. Mitchell gets to gallivant around the world (doing three weeks of missionary work, however), and even though the job market is still terrible when he returns, I get the feeling he’ll be fine too. Leonard has the least promising future, but that’s more to do with his illness than his financial prospects. Anyway, the recession has zero relation to the major themes of this book and only a minor influence on its plot.
Matt comments Part 2
Characters
I’m interested in hearing whose storyline you all found most compelling. Here’s my round-up:
Madeleine: a bore. She’s a pretty English major who’s “always been popular.” Considering how much of the book was excerpted from other texts, I wish we’d actually seen some of her thesis. Her relationship with Leonard developed so quickly (over one or two months?) that their reaction to its abrupt breakup seemed melodramatic and ridiculous.
Leonard: more interesting character with a compelling family back-story (his family home was the site of a murder!), but even his story dragged by end. This likely reflects his depressive state, but, not to sound callous, I found it hard to care. His disappearance at the end was sudden.
Mitchell: I liked him the best; that is, I liked reading about his spiritual development. He was the only main character with any real purpose outside of the love triangle. But I didn’t understand his realization, at the end, that he would never go to seminary school to study theology. Was it because he recognized his spiritual journey was superficial, and he couldn’t commit to Catholicism because he wanted to have lots of premarital sex?
Plot
I didn’t get why Madeleine and Leonard’s brief senior-year relationship was given so much weight, and their marriage also seemed rushed and silly. The ending was satisfying in that none of the characters ended up with each other, which was inevitable. That Madeline was going to pursue her studies and not focus on boys for a while doesn’t seem particularly profound or groundbreaking. The tie-in to the marriage plot (which had been all but forgotten by the final pages) seemed a bit too neat.
Do you think Eugenides’ idea about “the marriage plot” not being available to the modern novelist – that divorce has diminished its importance – was self-fulfilling? I mean, do we not care whether Madeleine and Leonard’s marriage works out (at least, I didn’t) because we know they can get an easy divorce and find someone new?
Writing
Very surprised by how colloquial the language is. Made for an extremely quick read. An occasional laziness in using pop-culture references to forgo actual description (“he looked like a young Tom Waits” etc.) that I wonder how much of this book will be lost on readers twenty or fifty years from now.
Eugenides seems unable to resist pointing out his literary influences. It’s not enough that he alludes to certain books; he has to explicitly state the reference. Like when Mitchell and the American traveler shack up in Paris à la Ishmael and Queequeg. Eugenides actually has Mitchell ask the stranger, “Did you ever read Moby-Dick?” Naturally, the stranger has, and he cracks a joke about which one of them is “the Indian.” Scenes like this are so obviously contrived I don’t know how they survive to the final draft. On the other hand, I probably missed many more subtle allusions since I’m not too familiar with Austen/the Brönte sisters, etc. I wouldn’t object to someone selecting a 19th-century “marriage plot” book for a future club meeting!
And here are my own comments: Ugh, I was so disappointed in The Marriage Plot. My thoughts, sadly, won’t be as organized as Matt’s, but I’m just going to go with the flow here. I won’t go into what I thought about Leonard or Mitchell, at least not in this comment, because Madeleine was the source of my main disappointment in the book.
Nothing about Madeleine seems real. The book neither starts nor ends with her point of view. We start from an omniscient third-person narrator looking not at her, but at her books. She is the sum of the stories that she reads. She is “incurably romantic” because she reads Austin, Eliot, and the Brontës. And yet, somehow, she is the very opposite of the heroines of those novels. Austin wrote of privileged (though not all were of course) women, bored, with nothing to do and no opportunities except to find a good husband to marry. However, from Emma to Marianne to Elizabeth Bennett, these characters were alive. They did things. They acted. They did what they could to escape from the bonds of class and gender that bound them.
Madeleine, on the other hand, is graduating from an Ivy League college in the 1980s. Despite the recession, she comes from a well-off family that has connections. She has every opportunity in the world, and yet she does nothing. She is totally dependent and paralyzed and stuck in perpetual childhood. What I wouldn’t have given to have had the types of publishing connections Madeleine had – what does she do when she gets an opportunity at Simon and Schuster? Why, she goes and gets a haircut, of course. What does she do when her marriage to Leonard goes south? Why, she wills “herself back to girlhood” spending hours shopping with her dippy friends. Even her innermost, deep dark sexual fantasy (the one behind the laughable one of being pampered) is to be spanked – spanked like a little girl. Ugh. And the final piece of awfulness is the ending. She gloms onto Mitchell to fill the hole in her heart (hah, the first thing I thought of was Bella’s hole in her heart, the fourth character in the unintended love rectangle in New Moon), but whether she stays with Mitchell or not, she doesn’t make any decision. Mitchell makes the decision. After having sex with Madeleine, it’s Mitchell who has the spiritual crisis. It’s Mitchell who makes the choice for Madeleine. Though the final word of the novel is Madeleine’s, it’s an answer to someone else’s question, and it isn’t even a decisive answer. Madeleine’s weak-kneed “Yes” couldn’t be any farther on the spectrum then the other “Yes” Eugenides is so obviously aping, the rising crescendo and the final exclamation point to Molly Bloom’s reminiscing, yes I said yes I will Yes.
Ugh, I could go on and on about how much Madeleine’s paper-thin portrayal ruined the book, but I’ll stop here. In a book that purports to be about, and maybe even tries to subvert, the marriage plot, to relegate the main female character to a totally reactive status puts Eugenides’ book far behind his literary predecessors.
Well, enough griping; I did like some of the writing and will put in some quotes in a different comment.
I, too, was disappointed by The Marriage Plot, although I have to disagree on one point. I thought Madeleine's character was in fact very real for a girl her age and background growing up in the 80s (sadly, I could point to many places where Madeleine's and my own thoughts/experiences converged at that age); but more to the point, I found her rather irrelevant. I didn't quite get the correlation between her character and the heroines of the Victorian novels, nor did I care. Despite Euginides' penchant to pen coming-of-age novels, none of these characters seemed to go through any sort of metamorphosis.
Mitchell came the closest, but his "spiritual journey" fell flat after fleeing India. He could have made a real difference there, but instead he opted to jet to NY under the delusion that he was meant to be with Madeleine. How lame. His only real "revelation" was that Madeleine never loved him (something she stated in the first chapters of the novel) nor ever would love him. Whoa. What an epiphany. Although I did like his act of selflessness at giving Madeleine an out by doing the breaking up for her (another example of her not taking any sort of responsibility or actions for her own life, yes, but oh-so-real).
And poor, poor Leondard. Not much to say here except that he was not in control of his life throughout the entire novel. Where Madeleine was controlled by Leonard in many ways, Leonard was controlled by his disease. Eugenides left him to fend for himself in the woods, and he might as well have left Madeleine there too for having portrayed her as little girl lost in the woods throughout the novel. Mitchell might have a chance, but I didn't get a feeling whatsoever as to what that chance might be. Rather I got the impression that all three characters would be perpetually roaming around aimlessly in the woods for all eternity (much like Ron, Hermione, and Harry in the last book of that awful series, That Which Must Not Be Named).
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