The Marriage Plot: A Novel

About the Author Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, he received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Médicis. The Marriage Plot (FSG, 2011) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. His collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint, is from FSG (2017). Eugenides is a professor of creative writing in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton. Product Description A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review • NPR • The New Republic • Salon • The Seattle Times • Houston Chronicle • The Miami Herald • Publisher's Weekly "Remind[s] us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love, and in love with books and ideas."―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "A grand romance in the Austen tradition."―USA Today Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes---the charismatic and intense Leonard Bankhead, and her old friend the mystically inclined Mitchell Grammaticus. As all three of them face life in the real world they will have to reevaluate everything they have learned. Jeffrey Eugenides creates a new kind of contemporary love story in "his most powerful novel yet" (Newsweek). Review “Eugenides's ability to reinvent the timeless tale of love and soul-searching is swoon-worthy.” ―Vanity Fair “I gorged myself on The Marriage Plot.” ―Geoff Dyer “A masterful storyteller.” ―The Seattle Times “Audacious and moving.” ―Time “Extremely ambitious...surprising, and propulsive.” ―Chicago Sun-Times “Deeply humane and elegantly constructed.” ―NPR “The finale of The Marriage Plot is unexpected, beautiful, and---Dare we hope?---timeless.” ―The Cleveland Plain Dealer “A master of voice.” ―The Washington Post “Wry, engaging, and beautifully constructed.” ―The New York Times Book Review Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. The Marriage Plot A NovelBy Jeffrey Eugenides PicadorCopyright © 2012 Jeffrey Eugenides All right reserved. ISBN: 9781250014764 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 tex