Novel+ Review: The Marriage Plot

            Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot was another book I acquired/read down in Los Angeles this past month. I picked it up after a friend sent me a link to a New York Magazine article called “Just Kids”.

Had I not read the first page or so of “Just Kids” I probably wouldn’t have bought The Marriage Plot. But I did read the first page or so, then buy the book, ergo, I feel inclined to make the following disclaimer: I have NO IDEA what reading the The Marriage Plot would have been like had I not been reading it through the lens provided by the first page-or-so of “Just Kids.” I’m just saying...

           Thing 1: I liked the book, i.e., enjoyed reading it. I found it stimulating, thought provoking, entertaining, anger-ing.

Sense I Got: The Marriage Plot is less a bildungsroman (as was suggested by “Just Kids”) and more a revenge novel, a revenge novel in which author Jeffrey Eugenides seeks to settle an old score between him and (1) “post-modernism” (post-modern literary-criticism, specifically), (2) David Foster Wallace, and (3) someone like The Marriage Plot’s “Madeleine Hanna.”

Conclusion I’m Drawing on the Basis of the Sense I Got: Jeffrey Eugenides--whose Pulitzer Prize winning Middle Sex I haven’t read and whose Virgin Suicides I’ve only seen the movie version of--has the literary equivalent of a little d*ck.

Think Bill Paxton in True Lies:

            Logic Behind My (Admittedly) Weird Science: If Eugenides didn’t have the literary equivalent of a little d*ck he would have written/published The Marriage Plot back in the late 1980s or early 1990s, when there were still people who believed in deconstruction and David Foster Wallace WAS ACTUALLY ALIVE and could’ve defended himself from what basically amounts to a kind of pity-ridden slander, and you know what they say about pity (“Basest form of currency there is”).   

My Largely Speculative Fuel for The Machine:

1. Eugenides is extremely relieved, like PREPARATION-H relieved, that po-mo-deconstruction has fallen out of fashion.
1. On page 43, Madeleine Hanna says, “Maybe it’s just me, but wasn’t it a relief to read a logical argument for once”; I bet this is exactly how Eugenides feels...
2. Eugenides understands just enough about the texts and tenets of post-modernism to be able to deride them (or, he understands just enough about people to be able deride them for posing as if they understand the texts and tenets of post-modernism).
1. Eugenides’ quote from Derrida’s Of Grammatology on page 47 seems borderline malicious. Yes that Derrida text is hard, but considering it’s the only direct quote from a text that gets repeatedly mentioned/used by characters who seem like TOTAL poser-a$$holes, well...
2. I can’t find it BUT Eugenides mentions Hegel once in passing, and I remember reading it and thinking, “You d*ck!”
3. Derrida’s only advocate in the WHOLE BOOK is the manic-depressive David Foster Wallace based character, Leonard BANKHEAD, and even he doesn’t give Derrida the thumbs-up, saying “You can’t just write him off” (p. 43).  
3. Eugenides has never himself been depressed, but has probably had to deal with his fair share of depressed people and the people who continue to love them (i.e., the Madeleine Hannas of the world).
1. While reading Eugenides descriptions of Wallace, er, Bankhead’s mania, I just got this sense that Eugenides only understood depression from the outside looking in. Call... it... a... hunch...
4. The End (Spoiler Alert): Jeffrey Eugenides’ own character in the novel, Mitchell Grammaticus, says to Madeleine Hannah (after David Foster Bankhead has exiled himself to the Great Northwest and divorced Madeleine), “Was there any novel where the heroine [Madeleine] gets married to the wrong guy [Bankhead] and then realizes it, and then the other suitor [Eugeneides] shows up, some guy who’s always been in love with her, and then they get together, but finally the second suitor realizes that the last thing the woman needs is to get married again, that she’s got more important things to do with her life?” (406). Now, if this isn’t the biggest piece of Ego-Pumping-Heroism masked as Self-Sacrifice=True-Love BULLSH*T I’ve encountered in a really, really, really long time, I... Just... Don’t... Know... What... Is.

Yeah, Yeah, Yeah: I know that it’s still unfashionable to talk about the character of the people who write the novels we read, but WHATEVER. I think Jeffrey Eugenides basically has the literary equivalent of a little d*ck and that The Marriage Plot is an enjoyable, fun, cowardly novel, the kind of novel I hope to never write.