The Marriage Plot

Summary

The story concerns three college friends from Brown University—Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell—beginning in their senior year, 1982, and follows them during their first year post-graduation.

Development

Eugenides began the novel after the publication of his novel Middlesex. He intended to write a “more tightly dramatized” novel than Middlesex, taking place over a year or several years, rather than 70. Originally, the plot concerned a debutante party, or a large family reunion, but after writing about the arrival of a daughter Madeleine to the party, he changed the plot to focus on her and her education.

Certain aspects of the novel are autobiographical. Mitchell, like Eugenides, is Greek, was raised in Detroit, carried a briefcase in college, and traveled to India after his graduation. Eugenides has said that certain traits of Madeleine and Leonard are also drawn from his experience and personality. Eugenides chose to set the novel at Brown, his alma mater, after choosing not to set it at a fictional college, saying that it would have been "too much trouble for what it was worth".

There is some debate as to whether the character Leonard is based on the author David Foster Wallace. Although Eugenides and Wallace were not friends, both were acquainted with Jonathan Franzen. Critics have pointed out that both Leonard and Wallace wear a bandana, chew tobacco, studied philosophy, and struggled with mental illness. Furthermore, both the character and Wallace had an interest in time and the passage of time and at least some of Leonard's dialogue appears to have been directly lifted from an article about Wallace. Eugenides has denied that the character is based on Wallace and cited two inspirations for the bandana: that the practice was fairly common among his friends at Brown, and that he was basing Leonard off of "Guns N' Roses and heavy metal guys".

Honors and awards

The Guardian, Salon, NPR, and The Washington Post considered the novel to be one of the best books of 2011.

It also received the 2011 Salon Book Award for Fiction and was featured on the Library Journal Best Books of the Year list.

Critical reception

The novel was well received by critics. W. Deresiewicz wrote, "'The Marriage Plot' is a new departure...intimate in tone and scale.... It’s about what Eugenides’s books are always about, no matter how they differ: the drama of coming of age.... It possesses the texture and pain of lived experience." C. Romano called it "the most entertaining campus novel since Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons."