The Marriage Plot (2011) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters edit see section history

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• Madeleine Hanna: Self-described Victorianist. Attractive Brown English major addicted to Robert Barthes A Lover's Discourse who is the woman in the love triangle.
• Mitchell Grammaticus: A religious studies major in love with Madeleine Hanna
• Leonard Bankhead: A brilliant but troubled science and philosophy major at Brown
• Phyllida Hanna: Mother to Madeleine and Alwyn who once attempted to be an actress.
• Alton Hanna: Madeleine's father. Retired president of Baxter College in New Jersey.
• Larry Pleshette: Mitchell's college roommate and travelling partner.
• Claire Schwartz: Larry's feminist girlfriend who is living her junior year abroad in Paris.
• Alwyn Hanna Higgins: Madeleine's older sister. Married with a 6 month old son.
• Kelly Traub: College friend of Madeleine's. Aspiring actress and real estate agent.
• Diane MacGregor: Older biologist at Pilgrim Lake. A 79 year old scientist working on gene mutations.
• Dean Grammaticus: Mitchell's father, lives outside Detroit, MI
• Lillian Grammaticus: Mitchell's mother.
• Rita Bankhead: Leonard's alcoholic mother, who lives in Oregon.
• Richard the Lionhearted: Alwyn's infant son, nephew to Madeliene Hanna.
• Thurston Meems: Add a description of this character.
• Alicia
• Dan Schneider
• Pookie Ames
• Jennifer Boomgaard
• Dabney Carlisle
• Marc Wheeland
• Olivia
• Kerbi
• Wendy Neuman
• Grover
• Harvey
• Bob Kilimnik
• Janice P.
• Bryce Ellis
• Henry
• Ted
• Hughes
• Luke Miller
• Dr. Perlmann
• Blake Higgins
• Dr. Shieu
• Moss Runk
• Darlene Withers
• Lollie Ames
• Whitney
• Lloyd G. Holloway
• Janet
• Hermann Richter
• Carrie Mox
• Claire Ruth
• Vikram Jaitly
• Mark Walker
• Rüdiger
• Billy Bainbridge
• Iannis
• Michael Zipperstein
• Lola Lopez
• Tim
• Professor Churchill
• David Malkiel
• Carl Beller
• Herb
• Mike
• Father Marucci
• Michael Zolodnek
• Geri
• Grimm
• Anne Wong
• K. McCall Saunders
• Heidi
• Sven
• Abby
• M. Myerson
• Clyde
• Susan
• Godfrey
• Bill
• Moira Pleshette
• Ken Auerbach
• Frank Bankhead
• Greta Malkiel
• Roger Pyle
• Vittorio
• Dr. Wilkins
• Cassandra Hart
• Meg Jones

Quotes edit see section history

• “His mind felt as if it was fizzing over. Words became other words inside his head, like patterns in a kaleidoscope. He kept making puns. No one understood what he was talking about. He became angry, irritable. Now, when he looked at people, who'd been laughing at his jokes an hour earlier, he saw that they were worried, concerned for him. And so he ran off into the night, or day, or night, and found other people to be with, so that the mad party might continue...”

  Leonard

• ““My goal in life is to become an adjective,””

  Leonard

• “"The worst thing about religion was religious people."”

• “"I was worried that virginity was like getting your ears pierced. If you didn’t keep an earring in, the hole might close up. "”

• “A Lover’s Discourse was the perfect cure for lovesickness. It was a repair manual for the heart, its one tool the brain. If you used your head, if you became aware of how love was culturally constructed and began to see your symptoms as purely mental, if you recognized that being “in love” was only an idea, then you could liberate yourself from its tyranny.”

• “Just someone who knows, from personal experience, how attractive it can be to think you can save somebody else by loving them.”

• “Listen, a girl’s not a watermelon you plug a hole in to see if it’s sweet.”

• “It might not even be that great to marry your ideal. Probably, once you attained your ideal, you got bored and wanted another.”

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• This, Tolstoy says, is our human predicament: we’re the man clutching the branch. Death awaits us. There is no escape. And so we distract ourselves by licking whatever drops of honey come within our reach.

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• In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.

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• That was when Leonard realized something crucial about depression. The smarter you were, the worse it was. The sharper your brain, the more it cut you up.

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• Enlightenment came from the extinction of desire. Desire didn’t bring fulfillment but only temporary satiety until the next temptation came along. And that was only if you were lucky enough to get what you wanted. If you didn’t, you spent your life in unrequited longing.

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• And it was during this period that Madeleine fully understood how the lover’s discourse was of an extreme solitude. The solitude was extreme because it wasn’t physical. It was extreme because you felt it while in the company of the person you loved. It was extreme because it was in your head, that most solitary of places.

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• That left a large contingent of people majoring in English by default. Because they weren’t left-brained enough for science, because history was too dry, philosophy too difficult, geology too petroleum-oriented, and math too mathematical—because they weren’t musical, artistic, financially motivated, or really all that smart, these people were pursuing university degrees doing something no different from what they’d done in first grade: reading stories. English was what people who didn’t know what to major in majored in.

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• “There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.”

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• College wasn’t like the real world. In the real world people dropped names based on their renown. In college, people dropped names based on their obscurity.

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• In Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely.

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• The more she thought about it, the more Madeleine understood that extreme solitude didn’t just describe the way she was feeling about Leonard. It explained how she’d always felt when she was in love. It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it.

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Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Providence, Rhode Island
• Brown University
• Prettybrook, New Jersey
• Calcutta
• Grosse Pointe, Michigan
• Paris
• Cape Cod
• Athens

Organizations edit see section history

• Deconstructions: Add a description of this organization.
• Missionaries of Charity
• Janeites: Literary critics who specialize in the works of Jane Austen.
• Pilgrim Lake Laboratories

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• The value of literature and words: Literature and literary discourse play an important role throughout the novel. All three of the major characters are "bookish" but the act of reading serves not only enjoyment. It fosters the exchange of ideas and serves as a catalyst for characters' major epiphanies.

Series & Lists edit see section history

Preceded by The Leftovers, and followed by State of Wonder.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Jeffrey Eugenides (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Salon Book Award (2011: Fiction)
• Indies Choice Book Awards (2012: Adult Fiction)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3555.U4M37
• Dewey: 813.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

I would say that this book could be read by an older teen...but certainly has many "grown up" ideas and experiences that I wouldn't want a pre-teen or young teen reading about. Sexual content, some graphic scenes describing sexual acts, drug use, and mature language about relationships.

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary

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