The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Chances are that this reader would like most any book that mentioned on its first page Edith Wharton, Henry James, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Jane Austin, George Elliot, and the Bronte sisters. Jeffrey Eugenides in his newest novel, The Marriage Plot, not only mentions all these authors, but shows via one of his three lead characters that he has been deeply influenced by them all. The setting is the graduation ceremony at Brown University in the spring of 1982, and Eugenides adopts in turn the voices of each of his three main characters who are about to begin their new post-graduate lives. Interestingly, his most convincing voice is that of a female character, Madeleine, whose primary interest is in Victorian literature. “She’s become an English major for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.” Madeleine is pursued by two young men, Leonard, whose dual interests are biology and philosophy, and Mitchell, who is fascinated by religious mystics and people like St. Teresa and Albert Schweitzer whose focus is simply doing good in the world. Most likely, each of the three characters is a side of Eugenides himself, and so it is no wonder that each speaks convincingly.

As in his meticulously researched novel, Middlesex, Eugenides displays a deep understanding of the topics that interest him. In this novel these topics are manic depression, mysticism, and the role of the marriage plot in Victorian and pre-Victorian literature. He also manages to show his understanding of and sympathy for feminism, both through the voice of Madeleine and the rather clumsy attempts of his male characters to rise above, or at least be ashamed of, their sexism. 

Eugenides reminds us that women were restricted from owning and inheriting property in early Victorian Britain and restricted from participating in politics, and that it was under these conditions that Victorian women writers wrote their books. 

Seen this way, eighteenth—and nineteenth—century literature, especially that written by women, was anything but old hat. Against tremendous odds, without anyone giving them the right to take up the pen or a proper education, women such as Anne Finch, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes, and Emily Dickenson had taken up the pen anyway, not only joining in the grand literary project but, if you could believe Gilbert and Fubar, creating a new literature at the same time, playing a man’s game while subverting it. Two sentences from The Madwoman in the Attic particularly struck Madeleine. “In recent years, for instance, while male writers seem increasingly to have felt exhausted by the need for revisionism which Bloom’s theory of the ‘anxiety of influence’ accurately describes, women writers have seen themselves as pioneers in a creativity so intense that their male counterparts have probably not experienced its analog since the Renaissance, or at least since the Romantic era. The son of many fathers, today’s male writer feel hopelessly belated: the daughter of too few mothers, today’s female writer feels that she is helping to create a viable tradition which is at last definitely emerging.”

But if Madeleine is attracted to the intelligence and relative independence of the women writers she so admires, she is nonetheless driven by the need to be recognized by the men in her life whom she still sees as intellectually superior. The summer after her graduation from Brown, instead of throwing all of her efforts into her own life and post graduate studies, she instead goes off to a biology think-tank with Leonard who has a fellowship there for the summer. And she does this in spite of the fact that on the very day of graduation, she discovers that Leonard is a manic depressive, and has (not for the first time) been committed to a psychiatric hospital. 

It is hard to imagine anyone trying to live with and care for someone who is manic depressive, and even harder to imagine a young woman in her twenties taking on this awesome responsibility. Eugenides takes the reader through a single summer of Madeleine trying to be the partner and caregiver of Leonard as his disease and the medication he uses to treat it lead him into a more and more isolated existence. Desperate to hide his illness from the scientists and co-fellowship students at the think-tank, he becomes ever more dependent on Madeleine, hating her to leave him even to play tennis or go to the city. “He didn’t want her to leave. If Madeleine left, he would be alone again, as he’d been growing up in a house with his family, as he was in his head and often in his dreams, and as he’d been in his room at the psych ward.” 

Meanwhile, Mitchell, the third voice in this story of young people struggling to find themselves in a complicated and unjust world, is traveling through India, reading religious mystics and trying to follow the example of St. Teresa. His character is the one least developed in this novel, and the least convincing. His quest makes him seem both younger and more naïve than the other characters, and yet it is primarily through him that Eugenides is able to give the reader some political commentary. Mitchell’s desperate but unrequited love for Madeleine, coupled with his yearning for purity and enlightenment, make him into an almost comic character, but one who nonetheless plays a pivotal role. He is perhaps more the actual mouthpiece for Eugenides that either of the other main characters.

In the end, I can’t say that this is a great or even a really good novel. I think Eugenides tries to do too much, too fast, and I have a hard time believing that his characters could really go through all the changes they do in a single summer. Perhaps he should have given them a few years to experience such life-changing events. Nevertheless, this is an interesting story, and Eugenides a gifted storyteller. It will leave you with much deeper understanding of the marriage plot and its role in both Victorian and contemporary novels, and perhaps give you a deeper understanding of the disease that is labeled manic depression.

The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Try to imagine what might have happened, how history might have rolled out, had Lenin not had a stroke at just the moment when Trotsky was on a train taking him to a resort for a much needed short vacation. Trotsky, a champion of democratic socialism, was next in line to succeed Lenin. Suppose he had not believed Stalin’s lie that there was no need for him to return immediately, since only a small, private service would occur to be followed weeks later by a huge state funeral. Imagine Stalin seizing on the accident of Trotsky’s absence from the state service, which in fact did occur almost immediately, to condemn him as at best disloyal, and at worst treasonous. Trotsky then declared an enemy of the state, a counter-revolutionary, and the ruthless Stalin assuming the mantel of power, liquidating any who dissented and setting the USSR on a course of rigidly centralized government. Suppose it had been otherwise.

In her incredibly ambitious novel, The Lacuna, Barbara Kingsolver posits the above question as one among many themes. She also takes on McCarthyism, the possibility of getting anything like truth from the press, the political responsibilities of the artist, the love life of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the devastation of World War II, the tyranny of the F.B.I. under J. Edgar Hoover, and the Mayan and Aztec empires of Mexico. 

I am a great admirer of Kingsolver; I have read almost all of her fiction and much of her non-fiction. I admire the way she weaves her love of biology and environmental issues into her works, her staunch support of feminist issues, her insistence that art is and must be political. That said, I think this particular book suffers from trying to do too much. A skillful editor may have convinced her to cut the sprawling five hundred page novel in half, or better yet, to make it into a series of books—perhaps one about the ancient history of Mexico, another about the relationship between Kahlo, Rivera, and Trotsky, and yet another about the perils of being an artist during the McCarthy era in the U.S. Trying to combine them all into one book obscures her message about the necessity of constantly viewing the present in historical context and, in my opinion, creates a morass stitched together by Kingsolver’s own broad interests rather than by an internal, organic unity. 

Kingsolver is certainly right to remind us that we are too quick to forget the past, too gullible in our trust of the press, too ready to turn a blind eye to the political oppression that has occurred in our recent past and which continues to occur now. However, a colleague of mine and I who decided to read this book together because of our admiration of Kingsolver found ourselves asking why she wrote the book at all, or, at least, why she tried to combine all of these different themes into a single book. There is no doubt that she had a keen interest in Trotsky and the ruthless way in which he was hunted down and killed in Mexico. Her research into the lives of Trotsky, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera is impressive, as is her knowledge of Mayan and Aztec cultures. Her descriptions of what it must have been like for artists who suffered through the McCarthy witch-hunts is both harrowing and convincing. 

The spokesperson in this novel, Harrison Shepherd, is a young man who straddles two cultures—born in the U.S. of a Mexican mother and American father, but raised for most of his young life in Mexico. He returns to this country after the death of Trotsky, settles into a small town in North Carolina and becomes a well known author who writes epics about the ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations of Mexico. Kingsolver uses the device of yet another narrator, Violet Brown, secretary to Sheperd, to give the reader another view of both the writer and the events that shape his life in the U.S.

Perhaps Kingsolver gives us a clue as to why she wrote this book in a conversation that occurs between Shepherd and Violet Brown.

“I have been wondering what your novel will be about,” she said. “Apart from the setting.” 

“I wonder too. I think I want to write about the end of things. How civilizations fall, and what leads up to that. How we’re connected to everything in the past."  

To my shock she said, “Oh, I wouldn’t.” 

“I think the readers won’t like it. We don’t like to see ourselves joined hard to the past. We’d as soon take the scissors and cut every ribbon of that." 

“Then I am sunk. All I ever write about is history.”

“People in gold arm bracelets, though. Nothing that would happen to our own kind. That’s how I reckon people take to it so well.”

“Oh. Then you think it wouldn’t go so well if I set my stories, let’s say, in a concentration camp in Texas or Georgia. One of those places where we sent our citizen Japs and Germans during the war.”

She looked stricken. “No, sir, we would not like to read that. Not even about the other Japanese sinking ships and bombing our coast. That’s over, and we’d just as soon be shed of it.”

“You’d do that? Take scissors and cut off your past?”

“I did already. My family would tell you I went to the town and got above my raisings.”

“Like I said. The magazines tell us we’re special, not like the ones that birthed us. Brand-new. They paint a picture of some old-country rube with a shawl on her head, and make you fear you’ll be like that, unless you buy cake mix and a home freezer. 

“But that sounds lonely, walking around without any ancestors.”

“I don’t say it’s good. It’s just how we be. I hate to say it, but that rube in the shawl is my sister, and I don’t want to be her. I can’t help it.”

Kingsolver does not want us to take scissors to our past; she wants to place us squarely in it. Not just the past in this country, but the past of Cortes and the Aztecs and the even more ancient Mayans. The past of Trotsky and Kahlo and Rivera. The ugliness of war and of political repression. I applaud her insistence on historicity. I admire her politics and her mighty gifts of story-telling, and perhaps you as readers will see more clearly than I just why all of these themes had to be gathered together in one sprawling novel. In this case, I can only say I’m glad to be finished and to move on.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

On the face of it, Julian Barnes’ Man Booker Prize winner, The Sense of an Ending, is not only a very short novel, it is also a very simple one. But then one might say that Barnes whole point in the novel is that no part of so-called history is to be taken on its face. Every life is more complicated than it seems, and memory a flimsy and unreliable guide even to our own lives, let alone the lives of those around us.

The story begins as one of three boys together at a boarding school: Tony, Colin, and Alex, who are then joined by a fourth, Adrian Finn. It is Tony who tells the story, but it Adrian who awakens the other three, and in a sense catapults them into their lives. 

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when the moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first indiscernible. 

Adrian is the brightest of the boys, and also the most serious. While the original three seem simply to use their cleverness to get by, Adrian is already deeply engaged. One of their teachers raises a question central to the novel, “What is history?” Adrian’s response seems at first as flippant as the offhand answers of the others, but turns out to be anything but flippant.

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” 

The first half of this short book takes the boys through boarding school, and the reader gets a perceptive look at the sexual insecurities of teenage boys who are anxious to meet girls, but unsure about what they expect or even want from them. Although the four boys pledge to remain close forever, in fact as they drift into their post-boarding school lives, different schools, different professions, they also drift from one another. Tony, the narrator, has a brief and perplexing relationship with a girl, Veronica, who then becomes involved with Adrian. Although Tony exited the relationship before Adrian hooks up with Veronica, he nevertheless manages to feel betrayed by both, with mild reservations about whether his reading is a just one. “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.”

Abruptly, surprisingly, the reader is informed that Adrian, the thinker, the serious one, commits suicide at twenty-two, having left an enigmatic, though existentially lucid note of explanation. Book One concludes with Tony grown up, married and divorced, his child also grown, and now looking back on his life as complete and, if not sensational, nevertheless satisfactory. So why a book Two at all? The slice of life novel seems complete, well written, entertaining if not extraordinary. But of course it is Book Two that re-raises all the questions about history, and shows graphically just where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacy of documentation. 

Although I have no intention of giving away the mysteries introduced in Book Two, it is this second looking back that makes this a profound novel. Tony, in his retirement, continues to read history, though he finds himself more interested in the histories of Greece and Rome than with those of his own time. 

Perhaps I just feel safe with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon. Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history—even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

A letter, along with a relatively small amount of money bequeathed him from an unlikely source, causes Tony to look again at his own life and to see how that lovely word, ‘deliquescent’ applies to his history. Indeed, the picture he has, the story he has told himself over and over until it has become solid and clear, begins to dissolve, to become liquid. Everything begins to shift; all that was in focus blurs. Nothing is as it had seemed. Not simply in Tony’s life, but for all of us who step back to take another look. 

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

While Book Two is what transforms this book from simply a well-told slice-of-life story into a philosophically profound piece, when I finished the book, I still found myself puzzled by all the attention it has received. Is this really a Booker Prize sort of novel? But after letting it percolate for a bit, I picked it up again, looking back on it a second time, much as Tony looks again at his own life, and this time I was struck with its depth. I now think it is much more than a well told story; I think you will too.