The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Euginides

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Before I go on and review this book (or preferrably, make a very long random post about anything but this book) I must say that I'm not a romance books reader. I'm not against romance and all that jazz, I just find some characters on romance books a bit oblivious and I always have to fight the urge to go inside the book to hunt down the characters and hit their head with a shovel. But I enjoy general fiction which adds romance and sweetness and cutesy couple and swoonable characters, as its sub-plot.


So you're probably wondering (or not) why on earth I want to read a book entitled The Marriage Plot? Well, I picked up the book on an used bookstore in Kuta because of its great deal, and because it's written by an author of one of my favorite books of all time, The Virgin Suicides.

I've written an analysis/rant on Madeliene here, so I'm going to make this real quick.

Madeliene is an English student in Brown University, currently writing a thesis on marriage plots. She is a 22 year-old daughter of a very wealthy family in the '80s. She also is recovering from a break-up.

One day, she met Mitchell Grammaticus, a friend of hers who is studying on Religious Studies and also has been in love with her for a very long time. They talked, which ended badly because Mitchell thought Madeliene was a very bad friend, who only came up to him only when she wanted to, just to neglect him after a few glances.

Not long after, she attended a class which was discussing Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology and she met Leonard Bankhead, a very aspiring scientist, who was also a brilliant reader and a seductive loner. He instantly stole her heart, and as she drew closer to him, she found that Leonard was not as she thought he was.

This book is pretty much a triangle love story wrapped in a very enticing packaging. This book is filled with wit, details, engaging prose and beautiful words, and of course, books. Edith Wharton, Charles Dickinson, Jane Austen, Henry James, even Kafka, you name it. The characters love reading and very well-educated, so at first reading this book made me nod a few times pretending to understand what they were saying, but after a while I could grasped what they mean. Even after I closed this book, I wrote a little note filled with new wishlist of books mentioned in this book.

A few people might raise their eye brows when they heard of the plot of this book. They had been anticipating to read Jeffrey Euginides next masterpiece, but they were disappointed when The Marriage Plot's plot seemed a little bit dull, compared to his other books. Triangle romance? Come on, we've had enough of Twilight already! But no, this book is not as simple as that. It deals with a lot of things other than romance. And Jeffrey Euginides' narrative is always good to watch, even though it feels uneven in some parts.

3/5 stars.