'The Marriage Plot' by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides (3.0)

This novel is the newest from Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of ‘Middlesex’, an oddly non-fantastical book about a hermaphrodite.  Once again he has an interesting perspective on subjects, in this case mental illness and relationships. ‘The Marriage Plot’ follows the lives of 3 college students as they make their way through the precarious and very important transition to adulthood.  In this novel, Mr. Eugenides tackles mental illness, a relatively touchy subject, with a gentle hand. He also examines various types of love between these 3 characters. The main character, Madeleine, is attracted to the brilliant, but odd Leonard. She is also conflicted about her feelings for Mitchell, who is deep, but far more ‘normal’. What I liked about the book was that the characters felt very real with interesting dilemmas. Maybe that is what led me to the ‘3’ rating, maybe they were too real to make the book extraordinary. Btw, after writing this paragraph, I read some of the reviews on Amazon. A number of people wrote that the characters were not real and quite pretentious. I guess it must depend on what type of real characters you know if your own life!