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The Marriage Plot

The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Knopf Canada | October 11, 2011 | Hardcover

Based on 52 ratings | Rate this | 1 review
The long-awaited new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides.

"There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel."
-Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn''t get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot: purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn''t lived up to expectations.

But now, in the spring of her senior year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course "to see what all the fuss is about," and, for reasons that have nothing to do with school, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morten - charismatic loner, college Darwinist and lost Oregon boy - who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus - devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton - resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

The triangle in this amazing and delicious novel about a generation beginning to grow up is age old, and completely fresh and surprising. With devastating wit, irony and an abiding understanding and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides resuscitates the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
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Reviews of The Marriage Plot

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  • 10 months ago
    Very good
    Ever so slightly schematic, but a great read. Madeline Hanna is endearing and believable. I laughed and at times found it profound. Recommend.
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– More About This Product –

The Marriage Plot

The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides

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From the Publisher

The long-awaited new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides.

"There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel."
-Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers

Madeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn''t get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was happily absorbed with Jane Austen and George Eliot: purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. Madeleine was the girl who dressed a little too nicely for the taste of her more bohemian friends, the perfect girlfriend whose college love life, despite her good looks, hadn''t lived up to expectations.

But now, in the spring of her senior year, Madeleine has enrolled in a semiotics course "to see what all the fuss is about," and, for reasons that have nothing to do with school, life and literature will never be the same. Not after she falls in love with Leonard Morten - charismatic loner, college Darwinist and lost Oregon boy - who is possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy and introduces her to the ecstasies of immediate experience. And certainly not after Mitchell Grammaticus - devotee of Patti Smith and Thomas Merton - resurfaces in her life, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.

The triangle in this amazing and delicious novel about a generation beginning to grow up is age old, and completely fresh and surprising. With devastating wit, irony and an abiding understanding and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides resuscitates the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

Format: Hardcover

Dimensions: 416 Pages, 5.91 × 9.06 × 1.18 in

Published: October 11, 2011

Publisher: Knopf Canada

Language: English

The following ISBNs are associated with this title:

ISBN - 10: 0307401863

ISBN - 13: 9780307401861

Read from the Book

To start with, look at all the books. 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. There were a whole lot of black- and- white New Directions paperbacks, mostly poetry by people like H.D. or Denise Levertov. 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 to provide textual support in her English honors thesis on the marriage plot. There was, in short, this mid- size but still portable library representing pretty much everything Madeleine had read in college, a collection of texts, seemingly chosen at random, whose focus slowly narrowed, like a personality test, a sophisticated one you couldn’t trick by anticipating the implications of its questions and finally got so lost in that your only recourse was to answer the simple truth. And then you waited for the result, hoping for “Artistic,” or “Passionate,” thinking you could live with “Sensitive,” secretly fearing “Narcissistic” and “Domestic,” but final
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From the Critics

New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Editors’ Choice A New York Times Notable Book LONGLIST 2013 – IMPAC Dublin Literary Award "Mr. Eugenides is blessed with the storyteller''s most magical gift, the ability to transform the mundane into the extraordinary." — The New York Times Book Review   “This extraordinary, liquidly written evocation of love’s mad rush and inevitable failures will feed your mind as you rapidly turn the pages. Highly recommended.” — Library Journal (starred review)   “Eugenides’s first novel since 2002’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Middlesex so impressively, ambitiously breaks the mold of its predecessor that it calls for the founding of a new prize to recognize its success both as a novel—and as a Jeffrey Eugenides novel.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)   “His characteristically deliberate, researched realization of place and personality serve him well, and he strikes perfectly tuned chords.... Eugenides realizes the novel whose dismantling his characters examine.” — Booklist (starred review)   “A stunning novel—erudite, compassionate and penetrating in its analysis of love relationships.... Dazzling—Eugenides continues to show that he is one of the finest of contemporary novelists.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)   “Sharp dialogue…. A remarkable achievement.... Brilliant.
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About the Author

JEFFREY EUGENIDES was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex, which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France''s Prix Medicis, and has sold more than 3 million copies.
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