The Marriage Plot: Wrapping it up (2)

[Spoilers galore below, so if you are planning to read it ....]

The most important moment in the book happens in the second-last section, which is called "And sometimes they were very sad". Well, it actually doesn't happen in that section but we get a flashback to it. Here is the order we learn things.

1. Leonard  proposes to Madeleine while in a manic state but she doesn't know that is what is happening. 
2. Then the story shifts to Mitchell's experiences in India. The only thing we know of her is that Mitchell receives a letter from Madeleine telling him that she is serious about her "boyfriend" and tells him anything between she and Mitchell is now officially over.
3. Then the section called And sometimes they were very sad" begins with the aftermath of a disaster. Madeleine and Leonard are married and living with her parents because he had a major breakdown on their honeymoon. They have no where else to live and Leonard is on suicide watch.
4. And then we get the flashback to the back and forth between Madeleine and her mother in the moments leading up to and immediately following her engagement to Leonard.

Okay, this is where it almost gets interesting. For it here that a moral question arises. What exactly that moral question is isn't clear. Here is how Eugenides brings it up. Madeleine's sister and mother came to visit Madeleine and Leonard and her sister snooped in the medicine cabinet and found Leonard's lithium. When she needs a weapon against Madeleine in a family argument that later takes place, the sister mentions the lithium in front of Madeleine's mother.

The mother and sister leave and Madeleine waits in dread for "the call". When it comes her mother says,

"... manic depression is a chronic condition. People have it their entire lives. There's no cure. People go in and out of hospital, they have breakdowns, they can't hold a job. And their families go along for the ride. Sweetheart? Madeleine? Are you there?'

"Yes," Madeleine said.

"I know you know all this. But I want you to think about what it would mean to marry a person with a ... with a mental illness. Not to mention raise a family with him."

"Who says I'm going to marry Leonard?"

Now that is an interesting quandary.

Let's note first that Madeleine isn't being honest with anyone, least of all herself here. She is in a  serious relationship with Leonard. Even if , like Madeleine, we never bother to think about where a serious relationship is going the inescapable truth is that it is going somewhere. The longer you spend together, the stronger the links between you. But it's worse than that. Madeleine has given up a chunk of her life to go live with Leonard while he does a research fellowship. Doing that and not knowing whether you want to get married is like having sex without birth control for a few months while you think about whether you want to have children.

The great eighteenth and nineteenth century novels would have confronted that issue directly but no one in this story except for Madeleine's mother even recognizes that it exists.

The problem that the novel does struggle with is whether bipolar syndrome (aka manic-depression) is a good enough reason to refuse to marry someone. Let's acknowledge that this is a difficult, gruelling really, decision for Madeleine. She is in love with the guy.

Okay, but let's also remind ourselves of some important details here. When Madeleine learns that Leonard is bipolar they are not a couple anymore. Not only are they not a couple, they broke up because Leonard responded to Madeleine declaring that she loved him by being a manipulative swine. He then has a breakdown but not because of the emotional stress of the break up. He has a breakdown because he stops taking his lithium. She learns about his breakdown and rushes to the hospital to see him.

And then she spends a long time taking care of him. I find this not even remotely plausible, everything we know about Madeleine tells us she would avoid a situation like this. Eugenides, however, has her proceed while wondering about her lifelong aversion to "unstable" people. And the thing that makes this tricky is that Madeleine clearly doesn't believe her aversion for unstable people is justifiable.

We need a modifier here. "Justifiable how?" is the obvious question but I'll leave that blank for now. The problem is that Madeleine loves Leonard and his illness doesn't seem like a good enough reason to avoid him. And again, she has broken up with him when she learns. She doesn't have to leave him, all she has to do is believe that she doesn't have to go back to him.

But she does go back to him even though he isn't the same guy he used to be. Among other things, the massive doses of lithium he now has to take have side effects so they have a lousy social life and a lousy sex life.

Okay, let's flash forward to that conversation between Madeleine and her mother again. Madeleine tries an analogy on her mother:

"Say Leonard had another disease, Mummy. Say he had diabetes or something. Would you be acting the same way about that?"

"Diabetes is a dreadful disease!" Phyllida cried.

"But you wouldn't care if my boyfriend needed insulin to stay healthy. That would be O.K. right? It wouldn't seem like some kind of moral failing."

"I didn't say anything about morality."

"You didn't have to."

No, she didn't have to because the whole discussion they are having is a moral argument. Both are making their points in moral terms and yet neither is willing to acknowledge that they are having a moral argument.

And it's an oddly lopsided moral argument. Phyllida is arguing for prudence and Madeleine is trying to defuse that argument. Madeleine doesn't have an argument of her own. And she never formulates one. What happens is that things start to go better than they had been and Madeleine forgets about the bad times and, more importantly, forgets that any relief she is experiencing is only temporary given Leonard's condition.

The terms she uses to think about this are very telling:

The experience of watching Leonard get better was like reading certain difficult books. It was like plowing through late James, or the pages about agrarian reform in Anna Karenina, until you suddenly got to a good part again, which kept getting better and better until you were so enthralled that you were almost grateful for the previous dull stretch because it increased your eventual pleasure.

Yeah sure.

What we have here is a peculiarly modern situation. We have people who argue endlessly in moral terms. Even their aesthetic judgments are made in moral terms. But, for all that, they don't take morality very seriously. Moral argument is only used to manipulate others, and sometimes to manipulate yourself, into behaving in the way that we desire. And that is important because, in the end, all morality comes down to wants: the moral outcome we seek is the one we want. No one believes that morality sits on any solider foundation that personal wants and no one believes that it could sit on anything solider than that. (the technical term for this sort of moral belief is "emotivism".)

The moral question that Madeleine never confronts is this: "Is it morally justifiable for her to end her relationship with Leonard and go look for someone else on the grounds that his mental illness makes the success of any marriage extremely unlikely?"

"Morally" justifiable. That's the modifier that was missing above. The question is not whether it's okay to avoid unstable people but whether it's morally justifiable to avoid a serious relationship leading to marriage with them. As long as Madeleine only treats it like a question of simply "avoiding them" it seems like a  question about unfair prejudice against others—witness how she defuses her mother's reasonable prudential concerns by painting her mother as unfairly biased against Leonard. But Madeleine isn't getting all antsy about having to sit on the same bus as an unstable person, what she is hesitating about is continuing a loving relationship that could lead to marriage. Except that she refuses to confront the question directly and neither does Eugenides.

And it's not just her. Real moral questions, the kind that have real answers that are true or false instead of simply being an expression of our desires tend to do that to us. Because they are so very serious, we'd rather not answer them. It's all so heavy.

And we do owe the person with bipolar syndrome something. We must care about them and even, if we take Jesus seriously, love them. But do you have to consider marrying them if you learn about their condition after a relationship has started?

It would be a different question if you were already married. Certainly, it would be wrong to divorce someone you had married if their bipolar syndrome was diagnosed after marriage. You made a vow to stick by them in sickness and in health. On the other hand, if you married someone who suffered from bipolar syndrome and they hid this fact from you until after marriage, I'd argue that you'd be well within your rights to ask to have the marriage annulled. A lot of people might try to make the marriage work anyway. They'd probably fail too. But they'd try and perhaps others might find this morally admirable.

Let me toss out an analogy here. Suppose you discovered, far into a dating relationship, that the attraction this person had felt for you was temporary and now they no longer felt anything for you. But they still wanted to get married for other reasons. Perhaps they really, really want children or maybe the invitations have all been sent out. It seems a lot easier then doesn't it? I suspect that there are some people who would still get married believing that they can "love enough for both of us" but it's much easier to see that what this person is doing in getting married to someone who doesn't love her is not morally admirable.

We all insist that love is a necessary condition for marriage. But is it sufficient. Try imagining how the novel would have read if madeleine had said, "But we really love one another Mummy!" Jeffrey Eugenides seems to grasp that love is a necessary condition for marriage but it isn't sufficient. What he doesn't seem to want to allow is that this is a question a girl and boy ought to ask themselves before getting married. That they ought to ask it before they even fall in love. Because this love and marriage stuff is serious.

But we can never go there if morality is never confronted as a source of truth. So long as moral questions are only about what we want and don't want to do, a novel like this can never go anywhere. The problem is not—as he sets it up—whether no fault divorce and prenuptial agreements have made the marriage plot impossible. That's nonsense and you can prove it by reading any of Emily Giffin's books which all not only handle the marriage plot , they do it well and at some moral depth.

If you want to get married you need a better reasons than, "But we really love one another and we really get along together and the sexual chemistry is amazing". You need to think about what marriage is where it's going to go and you need to think about whether there is a good reason not to get married.  Jane Austen knew this and that is why the English novel became great. She forces her heroines to confront the question of whether there is a good reason not to get married—and forces is the word because some of them really don't want to face the question— and sometimes they don't get married as a result. But Eugenides never makes Madeleine face it. She just drifts into and then out of marriage and then she sort of "gets over it" but having casual, and not very good sex, with Mitchell. And then the novel ends leaving us wondering why we read it.

The Marriage Plot: Time to change gears

I don't think there is anything more to say about this book and its failures. It is time, I think, to switch to the larger culture and its problems. A good place to start, I think, is with an insightful review at The Guardian. James Lasdun notes many of the same issues I have here.

He argues that the premise that the marriage plot no longer applies because of no-fault divorce and pre-nups doesn't do the 18th and 19th century novels justice.

It's a likably quixotic challenge; but I think it's premised on a misconception about those earlier books. What makes them great, surely, isn't just that marriage back then was a much higher-stakes game than it is now, but that their heroines are explored at such astounding emotional and moral depth, and articulated with such wit and precision, that just about anything that happens to them becomes rivetingly consequential. They would be no less interesting to us, I suspect, if the options of divorce and prenups were available to them. By the same token, I don't think the removal of those options would make Madeleine and her suitors any more interesting than they are, which is to say: moderately.

And that's right. 

I'd go further and say that it's a problem with post-modern art in any genre, we'd have a lot more respect for modern artist and writers "choosing" to do something different than what was done in the past if we honestly believed they could do the genres they are rejecting. Lasdun thinks that Eugenides has idiosyncratic strengths. I'm more inclined to think that he has avoided being seriously evaluated by writing oddball little tales that prevented his being assessed against a larger pool just as an athlete might compete in unicycle races so as to avoid being compared to more serious athletes in better known events. As long as Eugenides was writing about fairly freakish stuff such as group suicides and hermaphrodites, he didn't have to withstand comparison with the big girls of fiction that Madeleine enjoys reading so much. Now that he has put himself out there, his shortcomings as a novelist are painfully evident.

And it's not just as compared to the great writers of the past. I just finished reading Emily Giffin's Love the One You're With and find myself hard-pressed to say why the terribly serious Pulitzer-winning, capital-A-Art guy is entitled to more respect than the Chick Lit bestseller. Yes, Giffin has her weaknesses but so does Eugenides and when it comes to moral depth she wins comfortably.

Beyond that, I think our culture doesn't get the issues that apply in marriage. It's not enough to be "in love". Any two morons can fall in love.  What makes the Austen heroines in particular so impressive is their grasp of a whole raft or moral issues that come with just meeting and getting to know another person never mind marrying them. If you could somehow insert Elinor Dashwood into 2102 complete with birth control and fully updated about modern sexual mores, she might have casual sex but she would still be a lot more premeditated and  circumspect about whom she formed an attachment that might lead to marriage. The problem is not, as some conservatives argue, that we have easy hook ups now but that we've lost the ability to do more serious hook ups.

Nowhere is that more clear to me than when when I read this from Lasdun:

What we actually see of Madeleine seems rather ruthlessly uncomplicated, in fact, and furthermore the book as a whole seems to vindicate her chilly instinct to avoid "unstable people".  

Taking the points in reverse order, don't marry someone unstable. That's like building your house above a crumbling cliff. By all means take a moral interest in unstable people and support them where you can but don't marry them. The weird thing about Madeleine is that she suddenly stops being chilly with Leonard. With him she bizarrely drifts into a relationship that is at odds with everything she is. That she would have a one-night hook up with this creepy little guy would be understandable and would make for an interesting story as she tried to extract herself afterwards. That she falls in love with him is emotional and economic suicide. If she'd listened to the inner voice telling her to avoid relationships with unstable people, she would have saved herself a lot of grief.

To go back to the first point, being "ruthlessly uncomplicated" is a very good way to go about negotiating your way to marriage. There are very few characters as ruthlessly uncomplicated in their pursuit of a marriage partner than Elinor Dashwood or Fanny Price. And both would have made polite conversation with and then  instinctively avoided Leonard and Mitchell.

The Marriage Plot: My Generation cont'd

Mitchell had been reciting the Jesus Prayer for the past two weeks. He did this not only because it was the prayer that Franny Glass repeated to herself in Franny and Zooey (though this was certainly a recommendation). Mitchell approved of Franny's religious desperation, her withdrawal from life, and her disdain for "section men". He found her book-length nervous breakdown, during which she never once moved from the couch, not only thrillingly dramatic but cathartic in a way that Dostoevsky was supposed to be but wasn't, for him.

Are you getting a picture of Mitchell Grammaticus after reading that passage?

I ask because I'm not getting any picture at all. Mitchell, whose family name means teacher of literature and languages and whose first name means "Who is like God", never seems to have any existence outside his literary references.

I don't mean that he is an unbelievable character. I wish he were. Unfortunately, there are quite a few guys like Mitchell. They never experience life directly but always through some literary or musical reference. But, real though he may be, I don't know what we are supposed to make of such a guy.

You know, there was a significant Evangelical Protestant presence on most university campuses in the 1980s. If you wanted to write about a character who'd had a religious conversion at university, there are more likely routes to take than a guy who was inspired by Salinger and William James. Again, it's not that such a thing couldn't or didn't happen but, rather, why anyone should care about such a guy.

(By the way, it's an odd tick of "serious" writers these days that all religious belief amounts to a need for spiritual experiences.  All "religion" is content free. Later Leonard will meet and admire a woman with a strong evangelical streak but Eugenides will be sure to drain any specific dogma from her beliefs. These guys just don't get religion.)

Now, it says above that Mitchell's admiration for Franny and Zooey was not the only reason he took up the Jesus Prayer. So, the obvious question is, any others?

Still, even though Mitchell was undergoing a similar crisis of meaning, it hadn't been until he'd come across the Jesus Prayer in a book called The Orthodox Church that he'd decided to give it a try. The Jesus Prayer, it turned out, belonged to the religious tradition into which Mitchell had been obscurely baptized twenty-two years earlier. For this reason he felt entitled to say it.

"My what deep reasons you have for doing things," said all the girls visibly excited to have met such a man. (Again, we later find out that Leonard has met Mitchell before he met Madeleine and he is supposed to be a little intimidated at Mitchell's profound insight into religious issues. That just not credible given that we know about Mitchell.)

And it gets worse. Here is Mitchell analyzing the prayer, it turns out the only thing he really likes about the prayer is the repetitive, chant like quality,

... whenever Mitchell stopped to think about the words of the Jesus Prayer, he didn't much like them. "Lord Jesus" was a difficult opener. It had a Bible Belt ring. Likewise, asking for "mercy" felt lowly and serf-like. Having made it through "Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me," however, Mitchell was confronted with the final stumbling block of "a sinner." And this was hard indeed.

Well yes it is. But it kinda matters that you actually have some sympathy with the words you are praying. Otherwise, you may as well say "When it rains it pours" or "Alfred Lord Tennyson" or even "I want a blowjob" over and over again.

It's interesting, by the way, to note that Mitchell, like many non-believers gets here not by being morally lax but by magnifying the requirements of belief to the point that they are so rigorous that no one, save possibly a determined suicide, could meet them:

The gospels, which Mitchell didn't take literally, said you had to die to be born again. The mystics, which he took as literally as their metaphorical language allowed, said the self had to be subsumed in the Godhead. Mitchell liked the idea of being subsumed in the Godhead. But it was hard to kill your self off when you liked so many things about it.

Now, you may think, "that is just because Mitchell takes these things seriously and you, Jules, are a laxist. " But the problem is that, despite his insisting on a rigorist approach to some things, Mitchell does not, in fact, take anything very seriously. He is out looking for an experience largely for the sake of having experiences. He wants to go through this stuff without changing so he imagines that the only kind of change that will do is one so big it amounts to killing your "self" off so he won't have to do it.

(What is really happening here, of course, is that Eugenides is projecting Buddhism onto Christianity. Christianity as Christ taught it is based on self-interest—store up treasure in heaven—not self abnegation. When Christians talk about self-denial, we mean making yourself go with out things because you have a higher purpose and not the willful deletion of the self that drives Buddhism.)

We get confirmation of the shallowness of Mitchell by the way in an odd little segment in which Mitchell remembers an odd little nonconformist named "Moss" they met in school and how he and his friend Larry liked her.

Their silence registered solidarity with Moss against all the conventional people in their down vests and Adidas sneakers who were majoring in economics or engineering, spending the last period of total freedom in their lives doing nothing the least bit unordinary.

Think about that for a while. Here they are receiving a top drawer education at someone else's expense—and it's not just their parents, the taxpayers are also picking up a big part of the bill, along with alumni and various donors—so they can acquire an education and become adults capable of contributing to society, and Mitchell thinks about this period as "the last period of total freedom in their lives". (And the obvious question is, "Does Eugenides see this or is he as shallow as his creation?")

Yesterday, I suggested that Leonard and Madeleine were not very good representatives of my generation. Mitchell, on the other hand, is very much representative of a certain type you saw a lot of on campus back in the 1980s. (And, truth be told, of a type that I tended towards at times only snapping out of it when I graduated and was hit in the face with a stern dose of reality.)

But, the people in down vests and Adidas sneakers were also a representative type of my generation. In fact, there were many more of them. And you wouldn't learn much about them reading this book (or any other books favoured by literary elites). In fact, the whole of serious literature treats them with an odd contempt. (The only place you are going to see the story of the people who best represent my generation is in Chick Lit, which is one of the reasons I love reading it.)

By the way, I gave into temptation this morning and started Googling around to see what other people thought of the novel. Interestingly, I find that the three principals are a major stumbling block for a lot of people. Although many are willing to admit the book is well written, a lot of people can't like it because they just don't like Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell. I have to agree. All three are the sort of characters that, as my mother used to say, "You just want to slap them after a while".

The Marriage Plot: Talking 'bout my generation

I am thinking less and less of the book as I move through it. The upside is that it may just inspire me to finally buckle down and write a novel myself as I think this is a great subject that could be handled better.

I'm beginning to think that the really important question here is not, "Are these three likeable?" (although I haven't see a whole lot to like) but are they marriageable? You might or might not like them enough to let yourself fall in love with them but it would be morally iresponsible to marry any of the three principal characters.

[Warning: spoilers ahead] This is from the beginning but it really struck me. Madeleine is thinking about playing tennis against her father, whom she calls by his first name "Alton".

Madeleine had been trying to beat Alton her entire life life without success. This was even more infuriating because she was better than he was, at this point. But whenever she took a set from Alton he started intimidating her, acting mean, disputing calls, and her game fell apart.

You know, if you've never managed to beat someone despite "being better than they are", then you aren't better than they are. And that is the telling thing about two of the three main characters in this book: nothing is ever their fault. Madeleine is beautiful, sexually desirable and sexually responsive, she is interested and interesting, but she seems utterly unaware that other people have feelings too. They exist entirely as opportunities for her to exercise her emotions.

Fittingly, she falls in love with a guy who may well be the only human being on the planet even more self-involved than she is.

Later in the story, this guy, his name is Leonard, will have a major breakdown because he chooses to stop taking the medication that controls his bipolar swings. When contemplating the ensuing (100 percent predictable) break down he blames pretty much everyone and everything except himself.

By the way, he stopped taking his medication immediately after Madeleine dumps him, a move even he admits was justified on her part. But look how he analyzes the thing:

... the power had shifted in his relationship with Madeleine. Early on, Madeleine had been the needy one. She got jealous when Leonard talked to other girls at parties. She flashed warning signs of insecurity. Finally, she'd thrown in the towel completely and told him, "I love you." In response, Leonard had acted cool and cerebral, figuring that by keeping Madeleine in doubt he could bind her to him more closely. But Madeleine surprised him. She broke up with him on the spot.

So Leonard goes to see a therapist and gets this out of it:

And though Bryce's analysis of the situation—that Leonard was frightened of intimacy and so had self-protectively made fun of Madeleine's avowal—was pretty much on the mark, that didn't bring Madeleine back.

The problem is that this analysis is a great steaming pile of it. It's just an appalling cliché—men are afraid of intimacy—bad enough to be in an eighties movie trying to pass itself off as wisdom. Nowhere does Leonard seem to grasp that the real problem is that he is manipulative little narcissist. Look at how he thinks: "Leonard had acted cool and cerebral, figuring that by keeping Madeleine in doubt he could bind her to him more closely". And then when he gets into therapy, his only interest is in getting something that will make Madeleine come back to him.

But while he is keenly interested in "making" Madeleine do things, that is, while he is interested in morally manipulating her to do the things he ants her to do, it didn't occur to him to pick up his phone and apologize to her.

I'll get to the third main character tomorrow. But for now, it strikes me that this book presents an inaccurate portrayal of my generation. And it has to be such a portrait because the conceit is that it is saying something about the possibility of marriage for the generation that came of age in the 1980s. A story about three people with problems unique to them who never managed to get married wouldn't make any general point. This is a book about a specific generation and, in that sense, I think it fails.

The Marriage Plot: Chick Lit

It isn't, for reasons I'll get to, but it's very much like it. You get things like this:

Ten hours earlier, when she'd borrowed the black Betsey Johnson dress from Olivia, Madeleine had thought it looked good on her.

Every song anyone listens to or is playing in the background gets named too.

But what difference does it make that it's a Betsey Johnson dress? In Chick Lit we get this sort of brand identification because it's a convention. It tells us something about the person who owns the brand. But note here that Madeleine doesn't own the dress. She only borrowed it. It might tell us something about Olivia but Olivia exists only as a foil in this novel.

One of the things that Chick Lit doesn't do, and I've read a fair amount of it, is dwell on a sense of place. Characters spend more time analyzing their moral situation than they do thinking about the buildings or cities they are in. When a location comes up in Chick Lit, it tends to be iconic: Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris. A Chick Lit heroine would never go to Brown, she'd go to Harvard or Yale or to some community college while her friends went to Harvard or Yale. It's a very male thing to try to evoke a unique location in a novel. (This goes all the way back to Austen with her settings in Bath or London or her country houses which never have a specific identity. The whole point was to make it easy for you to draw on your knowledge to create an image of the house rather than to encourage you to think of a special house the way, for example, Evelyn Waugh does with Brideshead.)

The creating a specific location is not exclusively male, of course (Annie Dillard does it and does it very well to take only the first name to come to mind). But Eugenides tends to write a male sort of novel elsewhere in this book. I can't help but think that the Chick Lit motifs are Eugenides attempts to get inside a female character. I mention that because, as I go on through the book, I am increasingly convinced that he isn't very good at getting inside the female character.

It starts so strong with Madeleine at the center and very much possessed of agency. But he can't maintain that and she comes to exist more and more for others. Male others.

The big mistake, I think, is that one of the two men that Madeleine is choosing between turns out to be bipolar and on lithium. Now, as interesting as that might be as a plot complication, it entirely changes the way she assesses him. When she didn't know this about him, her choices turned on an impulsiveness and romanticism she found attractive on the one hand and a lack of stability and filthy apartment she didn't on the other. That is a fairly common set of traits in men and something a woman might analyze in terms of moral strengths and weaknesses. The second she find out he is bipolar, however, she can't really criticize those things but simply must deal with them.

Okay, real people fall in love with others who turn out to be bipolar so what's wrong with that? Well, maybe nothing, except that Madeleine's agency is sharply reduced. Now she moves to take care of the guy in more of a mothering role. She loses control over the direction of her life. Meanwhile he goes from being a romantic choice to being more of a problem for her to manage.

And there is the other guy, which is the subject for another post. But he is in love with her and the interesting tension all revolved around her capacity to make a choice and his just having to live with it. Only now she is no longer that woman but rather a character who is pulled into a typical "womanly" part.



PS: It is one of the more bizarre fixations of serious literature for the last few decades to think including that a character who is bipolar or (oh the horror, the horror) autistic will make the story they are telling more interesting or challenging. I think it is a left over from the 1960s drug culture and it's whacked out notions of expanded consciousness. Serious writers think that telling the story through or around a mentally ill person will enable them to make profound points about human experience and consciousness. This is a little like thinking you can make profound points about colour by describing how someone born blind "experiences" colour.

The Marriage Plot: Her books

I haven't finished yet but I'm far enough along that there are certain aspects of the book that seem of some significance as I look back. One of these is Madeleine's book collection. It's the very first thing in the book. We know about her books before we know her name.

There is something very right about this. I was at university at the same time (early 1980s) as Madeleine , Leonard and Mitchell and the cultural references are largely correct. One of the things that girls did back then was have their books on a shelf in their room and boys who were lucky enough to get into her room (a privilege that did not necessarily imply sex although it sometimes did) would look at her books and try to reach some conclusions about who and what she really was based on this collection. It's something we all did and I remember people talking about it.

So, as I say, there is something very right about it all. If anything, the problem, it seems to me, is that he doesn't make enough of it. University students are lousy tenants so they pay a premium. As a consequence, they end up jammed into apartments or houses and the only privacy, the only intimacy, they have is in their bedrooms. And even that is very limited. You can hear your roomies having sex and you can hear them having fights and breaking up. Odd as this may seem, to actually sit in a girl's bedroom and be able to study the spines of the books on her shelf was a more exclusive experience than knowing what she sounded like when she came or whether she and her boyfriend discussed issues such as would she swallow, would she wear more exciting underwear and would she please stop obsessing about his ex-girlfriend.

Fred Kaffenberger says he liked the three principals—Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell—in this novel. That's an important observation because it really comes down to that. Eugenides doesn't have the knack of creating romance about the places or activities he writes about. No one, reading this, would get a yen to go to Brown University. It all comes down to these three characters. You will either find them and their struggles compelling or you will hate the novel.

And Madeleine is the most important of the three. We meet her first and she is, at least to where I am at about seventy percent completed, the center of the book. The only thing the two men have in common is that they are both in love with her.

So let's look at her books in the order they get mentionned:

There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father on her twenty-first birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Brontë sisters.

I'll start with the "redoubtable" Brontës. Who is making this judgment? Please excuse me if I remind you that "redoubtable" means "formidable" and that, in a novel anyway, doesn't necessarily mean good. If you were a girl who voraciously reads and they were among your favourites, you might say "redoubtable" as a way of expressing the strength they had and the strength you got from reading them. If you were a boy interested in a girl who voraciously read novels the Brontës might be a formidable barrier because they were big, dense books that boys don't like to read because they dwell on a lot of heavy romantic stuff that doesn't interest boys. And that would matter a lot in a list that had started with Edith Wharton and Henry James, making for a very formidable group. If you were a boy in Madeleine's bedroom you might well think that the only small mercy is that there is no much-loved copy of Jude the Obscure in her collection.

Austen is a typical choice but she gets remarkably little attention in this book. There was a bit of a revolution going on in the eighties in that  the kinds of novels that voracious girl readers loved but that academics tended to diminish were beginning to get a strange new respect in English departments and Austen was the central figure in that revolution. In other words, she has to be there or the book would lose all credibility. But that is the problem for that is the only reason she is there. Much as a novel about a Canadian boy would have to mention hockey, a novel about a girl like Madeleine has to mention Austen. But that is all there is. Austen isn't much discussed and later in the book Madeleine will admit she has not made much of a study of Austen.

I suspect Eugenides hasn't read much Austen. Eliot he has read, his last novel was called Middlesex!

Next we get some poetry but poetry doesn't matter in this story and neither do the paperbacks Madeleine was assigned for classes. What does matter are the final two items listed, and they make for a rather odd pairing:

There were the Colette novels she read on the sly. There was the first edition of Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now using to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot.

Colette and Updike have nothing in common except that they both write a lot about sex and particularly about sex on the sly. And Madeleine reads them on the sly too! I wonder what she is likely to have learned from them? Colette always writes about feelings, about what it feels like to be in love. She does this even when cranking out soft-core porn about girls having "inappropriate" relationships with other girls or boys having affairs with older women. Her books can make you tingle for all that, they made me tingle plenty in my teen years, but they are very different from Updike who tends to describe acts.

Sadly, there is no connection, at least not yet, between these books and Madeleine's sex life. And you'd expect there to be. The impressions a teenager gets from the sexually suggestive books she reads on the sly should have a huge effect on her early sexual experience.

Finally, I should note that the significance of the title has already been explained right here on the first screen of my electronic edition of the novel.

Oh yeah, names. Madeleine's name is a derivative of Magdalen with all that implies. It's also the name of the pastry that triggers the memories in Proust. Are either of those things significant in this novel? I don't know.

Eugenides name is also intetesting, by the way. I'm not anything even remotely resembling a Greek scholar but it must mean "good family" or "good ancestors" or "good descent". Which is kind of appropriate because one major theme of the novel is about the social outsider (Mitchell) in pursuit of the insider (Madeleine). When Mitchell accidentally catches a glimpse of Madeleine's breast, he describes it as her "Episcopalian breast".

The Marriage Plot

I'm reading The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides (about which there will be more to come). I don't usually pay much attention to recent fiction and it is a rare thing when I read any "serious" novel published in the last sixty years. I got hooked after reading this post on a blog I really like by Fred Kaffenberger.

Reading his post my immediate reaction was to respectfully disagree about ... well, just about everything. Respectfully disagree because Kaffenberger is the sort of guy who deserves respect. Reading him for a few years now, I don't think he has made a single unfair or unmeasured comment about anyone; a far better record than my own.

But, as I say, I read his post and particularly this bit,

Perhaps the decline of marriage was already indicated by the marriage plot itself: that odd 19th Century fantasy that happiness and marriage are conterminous: to be happy is to be married, and to be married is to be happy. Such a confusion puts impossible demands on marriage, and short circuits the search for happiness.

and thought, "That's just wrong".

Part of the problem is that there is something very right about what he says and I will get to that at the bottom.

But first this: the notion that happiness and marriage are coterminous isn't a particularly 19th century thing. If anyone is to blame for such things it is the 20th century and Walt Disney would have to be near the top of the list of indicted conspirators.

I can only gesture at the main points here because it would be a long argument (probably a whole book) to do otherwise, but the key element of the great 18th and 19th century novels was that they recognized just how hard a thing marriage was to achieve. Whether you accept the premise or not, the proof that Elizabeth and Darcy would be happy is not that they are now married but that they both showed such virtue on the path to marriage. When we get to the end, we can say, "Now that we have seen what it took them to get there, we can see that they have what it takes to make their marriage work".

One of the really fascinating things about the classic marriage plot is how determinedly it isolates its two principals. This is true even in the sillier fiction. To take one of my favourite examples, in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, the female lover Ellena, is kidnapped by the evil villain and held in a series of remote locations and then, just when the male lover, Vivaldi, sets her free, he, in turn, is arrested by the Inquisition. Melodramatic? Perhaps but the point is each character is forced to face individual challenges.

And Pride and Prejudice isn't that much different. A series of obstacles (not the least of which is their disdain for one another) keep the characters away from one another and it is what they each do isolation that wins the day. Again, you can question whether the tests are the right ones but the novel doesn't make marriage and happiness coterminous. Elizabeth and Darcy may well be happier than they otherwise might have been had they not connected but the novel leaves us little doubt that both have the virtues to obtains such happiness as is possible in this world even if they had ended up single.

And it is worth remembering that Austen herself never married and yet she remains, even today, the single greatest writer of the marriage plot in novel form. That she believed in a form of happiness she never attained is important.

As I said above, while what Fred Kaffenberger has to say about the 19th century strikes me as unfair when applied to that period but it is absolutely true when applied to our own time. Consider Kathryn Jean Lopez. I can't find the original piece online so I can only refer you to a piece in which she is quoted but take a look at what Lopez had to say about The Bachelor:

But for what it was, it wasn’t too bad. Marriage doesn’t often get an endorsement like it on primetime television, with young people who claim to want “true love” and marriage. And they’re doing more handholding and talking, too, than jumping in and out of bed to find it. . . .

If you were among the 18.2 million Bachelor viewers and then turned on ER or Greta or went to sleep, or otherwise got on with your life, I’m not sure you didn’t walk away with a decent feeling about marriage. “The Bachelor” has a point when he defends the whole concept: “People have met in stranger ways. If the right person for you is in a certain place, even on an incredibly crazy show like this, you’ve got to take the chance.”

That folks is the "conservative" view.  The point here is not that Lopez grudgingly gives (very) limited praise to a trivial and trashy show. No, the problem is that Lopez accepts the silly premise—she thinks the challenge of marriage is finding and meeting the right person. The difference between Lopez's version of marriage and The Bachelor's version is a lot like the difference between the high class call girl and the hooker on the street; although one is cleaner, neater and more concerned with propriety and discretion than the other, they are both whores in the final analysis.

Eliminate all the cheap voyeurism and shoddy exploitation of publicity sluts that goes with The Bachelor and look at what Lopez thinks marriage is about: people who want true love and and are trying to find it. There is the fairytale in which marriage and happiness are coterminous in all its glory.

The problem with this is that you are surrounded by right people. There are millions of wonderful women and men in the world. And they are all around you: you see them at school, at work in your neighbourhood. Finding them is easy and meeting them them is only a little bit harder.

And you'll note that the question that is conspicuously absent here is any wondering on anyone's part about whether they are the right sort of person. The marriage plot as it is promoted today is about whether some silly little narcissist can find person that is right for them. Much as women's magazines perennially promise a swimsuit that is right for every shape, the modern marriage plot assumes that there is a right person out there for every girl. That a woman has to do a lot of hard work to look good in any swimsuit, no matter how "flattering", is brushed away. Marriage also requires a lot of hard work to make yourself into someone marriageable.

In Austen or Shakespeare, the obstacles that stand in the way of true love are more than occasions for drama. They are tests of the virtue of the lovers. They, on the other hand, take it as relatively easy to to fall in love. It says something, and nothing good, about our era that we see the point as finding the person you'll always be able to love.