![]() First edition cover | |
Author | Jeffrey Eugenides |
---|---|
Cover artist | Rodrigo Corral |
Country | United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Novel |
Publisher | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
Publication date | 2011 |
Media type | Print (Hardback) |
The Marriage Plot is a 2011 novel by American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. The novel grew out of a manuscript that Eugenides began after the publication of his sophomore Pulitizer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex. Eugenides has stated that he worked on the novel for about five or six years, and that portions are loosely based on his collegiate and post-collegiate experiences. [1] The book is both a realist story about marriage and a commentary on the kind of story it tells. [2]
The novel was well received by many critics, and was featured on year-end best of 2011 lists.
The story focuses on three college friends from Brown University — Madeleine Hanna, Leonard Bankhead, and Mitchell Grammaticus — beginning in their senior year, 1982, and subsequently follows them during their first year post-graduation. [3]
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. [4] 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. [4]
Certain aspects of the novel are autobiographical. Mitchell, like Eugenides, is Greek, was raised in Detroit, carried a briefcase in college, [4] 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. [1] [4] 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". [5]
There is some debate as to whether the character Leonard is based on the author David Foster Wallace. [6] [7] 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, have long hair, chew tobacco, study philosophy, and struggled with mental illness. [6] Furthermore, both the character and Wallace had an interest in time and the passage of time [7] and at least some of Leonard's dialogue appears to have been directly lifted from an article about Wallace. [8] [9] 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". [4] [5] [10]
An oft-quoted work in the novel, particularly by Madeleine, is Roland Barthes' seminal work A Lover's Discourse: Fragments.
The Guardian , Salon , NPR, and The Washington Post considered the novel to be one of the best books of 2011. [11] [12]
It also received the 2011 Salon Book Award for Fiction [13] and was featured on the Library Journal Best Books of the Year list.
The novel was generally well received by critics. [14] In The New York Times Book Review William 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." [15] C. Romano called it "the most entertaining campus novel since Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons ." [16]
However, reviews of the novel were not without criticism; Eleanor Barkhorn, writing for The Atlantic , praised the heroine Madeleine as "smart" and in many other ways realistic, but nonetheless criticized the novel for its lack of "believability" in depicting a modern female character whose "relationships [with almost all other women] are characterized more by spite than affection". [17] Barkhorn noted that the book is not unique in this manner, making reference to the Bechdel Test and stating that The Marriage Plot was a prime example of the storytelling trend the Test criticizes: "[t]here are countless other Madeleines in modern-day literature and film: smart, self-assured women who have all the trappings of contemporary womanhood except a group of friends to confide in". [17]
Barkhorn also compared the book to the early female authors of the literary genre that Eugenides references in both the novel and its title, opining [17] that writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, in depicting close homosocial relationships among women, were more psychologically accurate than Eugenides. She suggested that Madeleine's lack of such relationships was implausible in context ("If this were the way women really acted with their friends, it would be fine. [...] But real women don't treat their friends this way"; [17] "Women who love books, as Madeleine does, are especially prone to close friendships with other women [...] [i]t seems impossible that Madeleine would have made it through four years at Brown without meeting other women who'd rather discuss literature than men" [17] ), and further suggested that this aspect was detrimental to the book, declaring the plot's conclusion to be an "infuriating, preposterous ending" that "is only possible because Madeleine lives almost entirely in her own head, with no one to give her trusted counsel" and further adding that "[t]here are many ways rewriting the traditional marriage plot might be good for women, but editing out rich, supportive friendships isn't one of them". [17]
Dame Daphne du Maurier, Lady Browning, was an English novelist, biographer and playwright. Her parents were actor-manager Sir Gerald du Maurier and his wife, actress Muriel Beaumont. Her grandfather was George du Maurier, a writer and cartoonist.
Jeffrey Kent Eugenides is an American author. He has written numerous short stories and essays, as well as three novels: The Virgin Suicides (1993), Middlesex (2002), and The Marriage Plot (2011). The Virgin Suicides served as the basis of the 1999 film of the same name, while Middlesex received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Médicis.
The Virgin Suicides is the debut novel by American author Jeffrey Eugenides, published in 1993. The story, which is set in Grosse Pointe, Michigan during the 1970s, centers on the lives of five doomed sisters, the Lisbon girls. The novel is written in first person plural from the perspective of an anonymous group of teenage boys who struggle to find an explanation for the Lisbons' deaths. The novel's first chapter appeared in The Paris Review in 1990, and won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. The novel was adapted into a 1999 movie by director Sofia Coppola, starring Kirsten Dunst.
Margaret Wise Brown was an American writer of children's books, including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd. She has been called "the laureate of the nursery" for her achievements.
Middlesex is a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel by Jeffrey Eugenides published in 2002. The book is a bestseller, with more than four million copies sold since its publication. Its characters and events are loosely based on aspects of Eugenides' life and observations of his Greek heritage. It is not an autobiography; unlike the protagonist, Eugenides is not intersex. The author decided to write Middlesex after reading the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and finding himself dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions.
Hysterical realism is a term coined in 2000 by English critic James Wood to describe what he sees as a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between elaborately absurd prose, plotting, or characterization, on the one hand, and careful, detailed investigations of real, specific social phenomena on the other. It is also known as recherché postmodernism.
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments is a 1977 book by Roland Barthes. It contains a list of "fragments", some of which come from literature and some from his own philosophical thought, of a lover's point of view. Barthes calls them "figures"—gestures of the lover at work.
Madeleine Thien is a Canadian short story writer and novelist. The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature has considered her work as reflecting the increasingly trans-cultural nature of Canadian literature, exploring art, expression and politics inside Cambodia and China, as well as within diasporic East Asian communities. Thien's critically acclaimed novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, won the 2016 Governor General's Award for English-language fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Awards for Fiction. It was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the 2017 Rathbones Folio Prize. Her books have been translated into more than 25 languages.
Marriage plot is a term used, often in academic circles, to categorize a storyline that recurs in novels most prominently and more recently in films. Until the expansion of the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples, this plot centered exclusively on the courtship rituals between a man and a woman and the obstacles that faced the potential couple on its way to the nuptial payoff. The marriage plot became a popular source of entertainment in the 18th and 19th centuries with the rise of the middle class novel. The foremost practitioners of the form include some of the more illustrious names in English letters, among them Samuel Richardson, Jane Austen, George Eliot and the Brontë sisters.
The King of Attolia is a young adult fantasy novel by Megan Whalen Turner, published by the Greenwillow Books imprint of HarperCollins in 2006. It is the third novel in The Queen's Thief series that Turner inaugurated with The Thief in 1996.
The 21st century in literature refers to world literature produced during the 21st century. The measure of years is, for the purpose of this article, literature written from (roughly) the year 2001 to the present.
William Deresiewicz is an American author, essayist, and literary critic, who taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008. He is the author of A Jane Austen Education (2011), Excellent Sheep (2014), and The Death of the Artist (2020).
The Van Wickle Gates form the ornamental entrance to Brown University's main campus in Providence, Rhode Island. The gates stand at the intersection of College Street and Prospect Street at the crest of College Hill. Dedicated on June 18, 1901, they stand as a symbol for the campus and its 259-year history.
Madeleine or Madeline is a feminine given name, ultimately of Greek origin. The name exists in various spellings and pronunciations and is popular among those living in Europe and English-speakers, as well as followers of Christianity, as Mary Magdalene was a central figure in the New Testament.
The Pale King is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. It was planned as Wallace's third novel, and the first since Infinite Jest in 1996, but it was not completed at the time of his death. Before his suicide in 2008, Wallace organized the manuscript and associated computer files in a place where they would be found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages.
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Intersex, in humans and other animals, describes variations in sex characteristics including chromosomes, gonads, sex hormones, or genitals that, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, "do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies".
Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Like other members of the Ivy League, it is known for prestige, academic rigor and selective undergraduate admissions process. Among its peers, Brown is noted for a culture of campus activism and longstanding commitment to academic and intellectual freedom exemplified by its Open Curriculum and course "shopping period." The university has been described as the "progressive Ivy," "hip Ivy," and "creative Ivy."
A gender novel is a genre of novel that features gender, or the concept of gender, as a central theme to the plot of the novel. The concept of gender may be used to initiate debate regarding gender stereotypes, gender equality or the reversal of gender roles within books. This term is synonymous with gendered fiction. Gender novels may be categorized not only under the genre of gendered fiction but crime, novel of manners, romance novels, western novels, fantasy, and science-fiction.