The Marriage Plot

by Jeffrey Eugenides · read June 21, 2020

Review

Usually I really enjoy novels set in college but I didn't really like this one. I thought it was clever and I enjoyed reading about semiotics class, but I couldn't get behind either Madeleine or Leonard so the following 2/3s of the novel dragged on (unless they were about Mitchell).

Reading a novel after reading semiotic theory was like jogging empty-handed after jogging with hand weights. ... How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel. There were going to be people in it. Something was going to happen to them in a place resembling the world.

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