Given Jeffrey Eugenides’ bestseller status, the Sofia Coppola adaptation, his Pulitzer Prize, his image, striding manfully (okay, he’s carrying his glasses and a Moleskine), plastered on a billboard in Times Square, one can forget that his most recent novel, The Marriage Plot, is only his third.
The billboard treatment (which he seems embarrassed by) attests to Eugenides’ strange rock-star status — strange for an author, especially so for an author of literary fiction — which cannot be explained by the success of theVirgin Suicides, the awards for Middlesex, or the many millions of copies he has now sold.
His first two novels have become classics of the contemporary, perhaps because both seemed wholly their own. They boasted unique premises and voices, which Eugenides handled adeptly. A male chorus calls up its collective teenage fascination with the Lisbon girls, each of whom took her own life; the history of a genetic mutation is told as a family chronicle ending with the mutation’s fruition in the narrator, the hermaphrodite Cal. No other novels can lay claim to these. Plenty of novels since are reminiscent of one or the other.
The first line Eugenides wrote of The Marriage Plot (incidentally, not the first line of the book; it falls on page 19) is also the best summary of its premise: “Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.”
The Marriage Plot can be read as a story of whether a seemingly incurable romantic — an English major — can graduate to a more nuanced view of love, one tempered by her experiences with the uninhibited Leonard, a brilliant biologist suffering from bipolar disorder who is also Madeleine’s first real love, and the more reserved, scrupulous Mitchell, who has long carried a torch for her.
The story begins in 1982 at Brown (also Eugenides’ alma mater), where the three are in their final year. It follows them through their first year after graduation.
It’s a story about love, but also a love letter to stories: it is as much about our need for narrative, the influence of what we read, and the plots we carry in our minds.
Jeffrey Eugenides spoke to The Varsity in October.
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THE VARSITY
Let’s start with the origins of this book. When did you first have the idea for The Marriage Plot? Your last book was released in 2002; that was Middlesex.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Yeah. Before I’d published Middlesex, I started a book very different than Middlesex, which was about a debutante party, a very rich party. One of the daughters in that family was Madeleine, and she had a manic depressive boyfriend and also had another friend, named Mitchell, who was in love with her. So I had these three characters in my mind even before Middlesex was finished. After Middlesex came out, I went back to that novel and tried to write it, but for various reasons abandoned that novel after a couple years, just retaining those three characters, Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard, and writing a novel about them. At that point it wasn’t called The Marriage Plot and the marriage plot didn’t function in their story, but they were three people getting out of college and there was competing love interest between them.
THE VARSITY
Are you somebody who explores what a book is through the writing, or do you sit down for long periods of time before you ever put pen to paper?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
I’ll do both, but as that shows, my method is haphazard at best and often I’ll find that one book is not working for various reasons. And sometimes I’ll find one book in the collapse of another, which is what happened here. Something in writing about Madeleine seemed more original, fresher, and more energized than the other book that she was in. I realized I was hitting my material, and so I chose to follow her. But sometimes you don’t know that you’ve hit your material until you’ve written quite a bit of inferior material and it begins to somehow gel.
[pullquote]Those are the novels I really love, like Portrait of a Lady and Anna Karenina. [/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
For readers who haven’t read the book: What is the marriage plot of your title? Because you use it in a couple different ways.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Well, it’s obviously a reference to the literary critical term “the marriage plot,” which is the foundational plot of the novel, especially the English novel, running from Jane Austen up through Henry James, and I think it functions in Tolstoy and Flaubert as well, and many other writers, the idea of a book being about a young woman’s search for her true love or for her husband. As it began, those novels were comedies: they would begin with a woman, and then she would find the right guy and get married at the end; it would end with a wedding. As the 19th century went on, writers started following the women’s lives into their marriages, and often into the difficulties of their marriage, so it became more tragic and to me more interesting. Those are the novels I really love, like Portrait of a Lady and Anna Karenina.
So that’s what it is, and my character Madeleine is obsessed with those novels and has gained a very deep romantic idealism through reading those novels, which she’s trying to emancipate herself from by reading French theory.
THE VARSITY
And she writes a thesis on the marriage plot. Her advisor’s opinion is that since the state of marriage has declined, so too must the state of the novel.
Her junior year, Madeleine had taken an honors seminar called The Marriage Plot: Selected Novels of Austen, Eliot, and James. The class was taught by K. McCall Saunders. Saunders was a seventy-nine-year-old New Englander. He had a long, horsey face and a moist laugh that exposed his gaudy dental work. His pedagogical method consisted of his reading aloud lectures he’d written twenty or thirty years earlier. Madeleine stayed in the class because she felt sorry for Professor Saunders and because the reading list was so good. 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. What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel. Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t. You had to read historical fiction. You had to read non-Western novels involving traditional societies. Afghani novels, Indian novels. You had to go, literarily speaking, back in time.
To what degree do you share that opinion? Why does it matter, the state of the marriage plot today?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Well, I put that argument in the mouth of a very elderly professor who’s stuck in his ways for a reason. Those are thoughts that I’ve expressed or toyed with. I don’t entirely believe them, because I can imagine a million other great novels that have nothing to do with the marriage plot, but I do agree that it’s a terrible thing that has been lost.
THE VARSITY
I think your novel grapples with that issue of how to be a marriage plot novel in an age where a marriage plot would not seem to fit its old mould.
[pullquote]What I realized in writing the book is that while the marriage plot doesn’t function in society anymore, it still functions inside our heads a lot.[/pullquote]
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Right. I mean, this marriage plot, it is a marriage plot and it isn’t a marriage plot. It draws from that tradition while it violates that tradition all the time and in general is not averse to modernity at all. That’s what I was trying to do. What I realized in writing the book is that while the marriage plot doesn’t function in society anymore, it still functions inside our heads a lot. Within our own lives, we often have a kind of marriage plot going on that makes us think that it’s going to work out for us with somebody sometime. Certainly the characters in my novel are that way inclined.
THE VARSITY
One of the themes in this book is the relationship between art — specifically, the things we read — and life.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Yeah.
THE VARSITY
And it has an added dimension here, because the novel takes place in the early ’80s, and it starts with a college graduation. Deconstruction is all the rage on campus at the time, and is something that Madeleine struggles with. You have a scene in the semiotics seminar where there’s an argument about Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams: the argument is over whether the book is truly about Handke’s mother’s suicide, or are all books just about other books?
“I’m saying that if your mother kills herself it’s not a literary trope.”
Madeleine’s heart had quieted now. She was listening to the discussion with interest.
Thurston was nodding his head in a ay that somehow didn’t suggest agreement. “Yeah, O.K.,” he said. “Handke’s real mother killed herself. She died in a real world and Handke felt real grief or whatever. But that’s not what this book’s about. Books aren’t about ‘real life.’ Books are about other books.” …
What Thurston was saying seemed to Madeleine both insightful and horribly wrong. It was maybe true, what he said, but it shouldn’t have been.
You’re a contemporary writer, you’re writing in the period since then. So I guess my initial question would be: Would you say The Marriage Plot is a post-deconstruction novel?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
My book? My marriage plot?
THE VARSITY
Your marriage plot.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
I think you can read it both ways. A lot of my writing is a hybridized form of postmodernism and more traditional novelistic narrative. So you can read this book in a postmodern way and see it as a deconstruction of the marriage plot, but you can also read it as a sincere story about young people grappling with love and their identities. I think it’s both. I wouldn’t want to write a book that’s merely an exercise in postmodern cleverness, but I’m influenced enough by it by virtue of having grown up at the time I did and liking many of the theorists and writers who came from that time to have it as a second nature, in a way. So it’s always in there. It’s in there inMiddlesex as well in many elements. But I still write novels that are stories and that hopefully can be believed in by the reader.
THE VARSITY
Is that your essential ambition for your writing?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
It’s how it’s turning out, so I’d better call it my ambition.
[pullquote]I want to do something new with the novel, but I found that the only way forward is to combine forms together. It’s this hybrid. [/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
I guess another way of putting that is “Why do you write novels?” There’s two ways to go about that question. One is “What compels you to write novels?” But also, “What role do novels have to play in our contemporary, early 21st-century life?”
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Well, just to put a coda on my previous answer: I want to do something new with the novel, but I found that the only way forward is to combine forms together. Again, it’s this hybrid. Merely doing something, you know, stream of consciousness or with different punctuation, mostly those experiments have already been done, so they don’t seem that new when they’re done again. The way forward might be in reinventing and reclaiming certain parts of the literary tradition, and then combining those with a more postmodern sensibility.
Now, the bigger question is harder to answer. What role do novels play? I still think that the form of the novel is the best thing we have for describing human consciousness. Certainly in this book I was trying to teach myself how to write characters and really describe what’s going on in their minds. You can’t do it in film and you can’t do it in drama, but in a novel you really have the space and the means to articulate mental processes. I think it’s a record of how people feel at any one time. A contemporary novel can tell the reader so much about what it’s like to be alive in this world. That seems to me to be very important. When I read novelists who do that, I feel enlightened and informed by those books. So I guess that’s their function.
[pullquote]It’s a record of how people feel at any one time. A contemporary novel can tell the reader so much about what it’s like to be alive in this world. [/pullquote]
THE VARSITY
One of the things that your characters struggle with is post-collegiate life. I think the character of Madeleine in particular spoke to me because I was an English major.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Are you still in college?
THE VARSITY
No, I’m a recent graduate.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
So you’re actually exactly like the characters.
THE VARSITY
Yes, and this is something I struggle with as well, and I think a lot of people do when coming out of university. Specifically, I was thinking about the role your degree plays in your education. Your characters are greatly influenced by what they read, but to me it seems like you almost have to do your degree twice to get the full value of what you’re reading.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
How do you mean?
THE VARSITY
In that the first time, when you do the work to get that piece of paper, when you start reading those books you’re maybe 18, 19 years old. You’re not fully formed as a person, but you’re reacting to what you’re reading, what you’re reading is becoming a part of who you are. At the same time, I think the role of the university is essentially to mess you up, to get unsorted.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Mm-hm.
THE VARSITY
And so the post-degree phase of someone’s life…
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Is when the real education begins. Yeah, I’d agree with that.
THE VARSITY
What was your post-university like?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
My post-university was reading a ton. From 22 to 30 it was maybe the most strenuous time of reading other novels. College gives you the sense of what’s out there, or it should, and then there’s the process of doing the work and filling it in and reading. So I think a lot of my novelistic education went on then, definitely. And writing, obviously, too.
THE VARSITY
Was it largely reading what you hadn’t read in university?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Yeah! For me, oddly, it was reading Tolstoy. I didn’t read Tolstoy in college at all.
THE VARSITY
Yeah.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
I knew all about Joyce and Proust. Didn’t know anything about Tolstoy. So it was filling in a lot of things like that.
While he wrote, he felt, for the first time, as though he weren’t in school anymore. He wasn’t answering questions to get a grade on a test. He was trying to diagnose the predicament he felt himself to be in. And not just his predicament, either, but that of everyone he knew. It was an odd feeling. He kept writing the names Heidegger and Tillich but he was thinking about himself and all his friends. … As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical application. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was the perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.
THE VARSITY
In other interviews that you’ve done regarding this novel it seems that you’ve bristled at the suggestion that this is an autobiographical novel, or that there are autobiographical aspects to, say, Mitchell’s story. Why do you have that reaction?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
I don’t bristle.
THE VARSITY
Okay.
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
There’s obviously autobiographical resemblances between me and Mitchell, strong ones; also quite a lot between me and Madeleine, and also a fair number between me and Leonard.
THE VARSITY
What are the similarities between you and Leonard?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Well, I won’t tell you. There are things in the book that he does that I have done in my life. I don’t have a mental illness, but many of the things he says and does come from my life or somebody I know, so it’s bound up with personal experience.
[pullquote]You use your life and all the details of it as scaffolding on which to make your inventions. The inventions are what fiction is about.[/pullquote]
What I resist is the idea that because you take part of your life and memories and events to write a novel, that then everything else in the novel is supposed to be somehow autobiographical, that it wasn’t invention. You use your life and all the details of it as scaffolding on which to make your inventions, and the inventions are what fiction is about. If I wrote about my life, it would be very boring; it wouldn’t be interesting, most of it. But everything that happens in the story, all the marriages — I mean, I didn’t get married when I was in my 20s. I didn’t even think about it, really. So all that stuff I have to make up, and it seems as completely invented asMiddlesex is, but the way I get people to believe it and the way I get myself to believe it is to make it close to my time at college, what it felt like at college. There’s no way for me, or anyone, to really write a realistic novel without drawing on their own memories.
So it’s a question of where they [critics] take the autobiographical. They want to sum the whole book up that way and act like I just sat down and wrote what happened to me and I just called it a day. And that’s just not what the book is.
THE VARSITY
One of the similarities between you and Mitchell is that you’re both from Detroit. When was the last time you lived there?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
I haven’t lived there since I was 18, but I go back a lot, so it’s just there. That’s me.
THE VARSITY
Is there something about that city that calls something out of you that you return to it in your novels?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
Well, I still have a real connection with it, as you do for wherever you grew up, and it’s an amazing city. I mean, the history of it is so dramatic, from being a total powerhouse to being a complete ruin almost, and the feeling everyone has there that it’s always going to come back. People have a kind of stoicism there — part blindness, part bravery — and it’s an interesting place to write about. People haven’t written about it very much — you’ve got a million novels about New York and everything — so it’s my place, and I’ve stuck to it. I mean, this novel doesn’t have so much Detroit in it.
THE VARSITY
No, but I found it interesting because you did make that choice to have Mitchell be from Detroit — or did it not feel like so much of a choice?
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
I decided, you know, I thought I wanted a little Detroit in the book. And I could have made him from somewhere else, I could have tried to disguise him, but I think people would still see me in him, no matter what I did. I could say he’s from Pittsburgh, and people would be like, “Yeah, sure.”
THE VARSITY
“He’s really from Detroit.”
[both laugh]
JEFFREY EUGENIDES
They would! So what’s the use, you know?
