It’s not strange to connect with the main character of a book, but feeling something in common with several of them is a little more rare.
Authors often bring you along for the ride by making you root for the protagonist, especially if they are narrating. In “The Marriage Plot,” Jeffrey Eugenides gave me three people who had me nodding along with their experiences.
On a superficial level, he named the main female character Madeleine Hanna, which is both extremely close to the name of my niece and also highly distracting anytime he talks about her family and calls them the Hannas.
Madeleine begins the story as a student who is about to graduate from Brown University. Through some flashbacks we learn about her earlier years at the school, including a night she goes to a party in her building and her friend Mitchell notices she keeps leaving.
“I figured since everyone was going to the party, the washers would be free,” she says. “So I decided to do my laundry at the same time.”
This is brilliant thinking and I would 100 percent do the same. Multitasking efficiency doesn’t stop for parties.
Mitchell, when asked to send in a picture for the freshmen directory decides he doesn’t want to submit one of himself. Instead he flips open a book on Civil War history and cuts out the picture of a soldier. Again, brilliant.
Mitchell is infatuated with Madeleine to the point that he thought to himself upon meeting her that they would one day be married. Unfortunately for him, she’s a little more interested in a guy named Leonard.
Leonard is an interesting character who is both super smart and also struggles with depression. On his good days, he makes witty observations and engages in deep intellectual conversations with ease. One day Madeleine finds him at the library talking to a girl who works there about imagining life from the point of view of a fly.
“We move in slow motion to them,” he says. “They can see the swatter coming from a million miles away. The flies are like, ‘Wake me when the swatter gets close.'”
That’s the kind of random look at life I can really support.
Leonard and Madeleine meet during a seminar class that has a super obnoxious student named Thurston, which actually reminded me a lot of my own college experience.
During my first semester, I was in an English class with about 15 people, and only one other guy. If you know me at all, it’s probably not surprising that I did a lot of listening to other people’s takes and not raising my hand every two seconds. The other guy was the opposite. He was the student who appeared to like hearing the sound of his own voice. At the time, I actually was a little jealous of him and thought it would be nice to be more like him, always having something to add and commanding that attention.
There’s a quote from the book’s version of that kid that reminded me how much that view changed for me:
“But it’s just a question of whether you can use a discredited discourse — like, say reason — to explicate something as paradigmatically revolutionary as deconstruction,” Thurston says.
It’s the kind of statement that makes you want to punch your own self in the face for having listened. Madeleine rolls her eyes.
Late in my college career I took a political science course and the same kid ended up in my class. He was still doing the same thing — raising his hand constantly and spouting sentences like Thurston’s — but my reaction was different. I had realized much more how comfortable I was with my way of academic life (and life in general) and how our different personalities fit in to the whole fabric of the experience. Most of all, I realized how important it was to be genuine and not forcing bullshit to try to impress people who are rolling their eyes at you.
Madeleine makes her own discoveries about herself and what she sees in the mirror. At one point she and Leonard break up, leaving her feeling rejected. She looks at herself and sees all these specific imperfections.
“Madeleine knew that this self-appraisal might not be accurate. A bruised ego reflected its own image.”
I thought that was one of the more striking notes in the book. Think about all the times you fail — big and small — or are rejected in some way. It’s so easy to focus inwardly and go looking for those faults, and then inflate them. But it’s that bruised ego talking, showing itself to you in a way that is not truly you.
Overall, this is in many parts a thoroughly depressing story, and for all the interesting and funny times the characters have, they can be ones from which you want to turn away. But not every story is sunshine and lollipops, and this is one I would still recommend.
