Set in the early 1980s, The Marriage Plot paints a lavishly detailed portrait of a love triangle. Though its exploration of the lives and loves of its characters is often moving, the novel never quite reaches the level of those "books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things," one of its protagonists describes.
Madeleine Hanna, Leonard Bankhead and Mitchell Grammaticus are Brown University graduates taking their first tentative steps in the real world. Leonard, a brilliant manic-depressive, is the man who wins literature student Madeleine but can't keep her. Mitchell, a spiritual seeker, is the man who wants her but can't have her. The novel traces their intertwining paths in the months after graduation, as Madeleine and Leonard struggle to establish a firm relationship on ever-shifting ground and Mitchell departs for India.
Whether it's the Brown campus on graduation day, a wintry afternoon on Cape Cod, the desperate environment of Mother Teresa's Home for Dying Destitutes or the bipolar mind, Eugenides's descriptive powers are vivid and he displays a depth of characterization and commanding prose style that sustain the story's momentum.
But perhaps because the trials of Madeleine, Leonard and Hanna look more like stumbles than real falls, it's hard to shake the sense that the stakes here aren't quite high enough to engage us fully. Without denying its considerable pleasures, Eugenides's (Middlesex) novel ultimately amounts to something less than the sum of its parts. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer