Book review: 'The Marriage Plot'

Book: The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
406 pages
Rs399

I have often found it hard to review books that end up moving me deeply, books with which I find — to use yet another overwrought cliché — an emotional connect. Such reviews, I find, are invariably indulgent and self-centred, even sappy at times. They say little about the book and far more about me. As much as I would like to believe otherwise, the latter does not make for better consumption. So when I was asked to review Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, I did first have to confess that I was perhaps the wrong man for the job. It would be almost impossible for me to be objective about a book whose three protagonists insisted on mirroring nearly all my post-adolescent experience and narratives.
Madeleine Hanna, with whose book collection, hangover and graduation we start the novel, turns out to be an English major. I was too, and like Madeleine, I had taken a course in semiotics because — let’s face it — that’s what a cool kid on campus would do. The half-rakish, blow-hot, blow-cold, glib and incisive Leonard, who Madeleine falls hopelessly in love with, is diagnosed as manic-depressive (bi-polar). Some five years ago, a wild mood swing, much like those suffered by Leonard, sent me to a hospital for a few weeks. My bi-polarity was clearly the cause.

Mitchell, the last piece in Eugenides’ jigsaw, is propelled by his unflinching love for Madeleine and a strong dose of religious fervour. Of all places, he finds himself in Calcutta and volunteers at Mother Teresa’s Nirmal Hriday. I grew up in that city and spent three summers working with the nuns from Missionaries of Charity. It perhaps goes without saying that I could rightly be accused of bias if I were to wax eloquent about a novel, which in my estimation, was the finest piece of literary fiction I read in 2011. You can’t blame this judgement of mine. We all like to read about ourselves, especially when it is a Pulitzer winner that’s writing about you.

To safeguard a vestige of neutrality and needed criticism (I tend to go overboard about things I like and love) I asked an ex and still dear friend to read The Marriage Plot. Just so that you get an opinion that hasn’t been coloured by an imposed sense of glorified autobiography, given below is a rough transcript of the conversation we had once she had finished with the book:

Trishna: You know, you’re a real ass for making me read this book.

Advaita: Look, only because it is a little close to the bone, that doesn’t mean it makes me an ass. Or more of an ass at least.

T: But what’s your point? That you make a Leonard, absolved of all that you do because of an illness, and I am a Madeleine left to pick up the pieces.

A: That’s not my point. I do take responsibility for what I might have done and said.

T: Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound angry.

A: I don’t think you did.

T: It’s just that ... How can a book get it all so right? Everything — from the way we acted, from what we wanted, to the way I made your room more liveable.

A: And the way I needed to call people incessantly when I was manic. And how they’d humour me and then not. And that constructed lucidity. When everything was clear.

T: When you were God.

A: Yes, when I was God. Those were good days. I just wish I had more of a chance to choose which God I’d become.

T: Hang on. Before your narcissism takes hold again, let’s go back for a second. The trouble with this book, really, is how well it is written.

A: And come to think about it, right, it’s called The Marriage ‘Plot’. You’d think that it’s all about Leonard, and then about Mitchell. Madeleine wants Leonard and Mitchell wants Madeleine. Typical, but then you realise that Eugenides does this canny, rather sly thing. He takes away agency from every one of these characters and the only thing that’s resolutely supreme is a plot.

T: I did keep thinking of Madeleine though. She seemed somehow incomplete.

A: She is, isn’t she? But no more than an insensible Leonard or Mitchell for that matter. Mitchell doesn’t even have Madeleine. Worse still, he doesn’t even get the satisfaction of being one with the dying in Calcutta.

T: Did you have to do all that in Nirmal Hriday. Clean them up and stuff?

A: I did, and it never felt strange. But I was young and very enthusiastic.

T: Weren’t we all.

A: Ouch! I shouldn’t have asked you to read this book. No?

T: Look, don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed reading it. It’s just that it brought a lot of stuff back.

A: You really aren’t helping. I hope you know that.

T: Helping with what?

A: I called you for an objective view on the book. It is for a review I’m doing for this paper.

T: Okay, I guess you could say something like this — ‘The Marriage Plot makes you fall in love with strange ideas like the impossibility of even the best-intentioned love lasting forever. So it doesn’t melt your heart. It breaks it. Tread with care.’ Will that do?

A: Wonderfully! Can’t thank you enough.

(Names have been changed on request)