Love, books and other passions

The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Fourth Estate

In what must go down as one of the most compelling opening paragraphs of a novel written in recent times, The Marriage Plot connects the reader directly with the mindset of its bookish female protagonist, Madeleine Hanna, and with the audacious literary intent of its author in one fell swoop.

'To start with,' urges the omniscient narrator of Jeffrey Eugenides' long-awaited third novel, 'look at all the books. There were her Edith Wharton novels, arranged not by title but date of publication; there was the complete modern library of Henry James, a gift from her father on her 21st birthday; there were the dog-eared paperbacks assigned in her college courses, a lot of Dickens, a smidgen of Trollope, along with good helpings of Austen, George Eliot, and the redoubtable Bronte sisters ...'

By the time we have completed the rounds of Madeleine's bookshelves, we know not only that she is writing her English honours thesis on the theme of the marriage plot, but that we're in for a complete overhaul of the classic love story and the Victorian novel.

And what an overhaul it is.

Eugenides manages to reanimate both the coming-of-age novel and the traditional love story in a narrative that is as charged with eroticism, wit, humour and pathos as it is with literary resonances. Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, is of course famous for doing just that. But The Marriage Plot confounds all expectations. A big, capacious, all-encompassing novel anchored in modern reality and an abundance of detail, it revolves around literature and an unconventional love triangle.