Don’t believe the pseuds. You don’t have to be clever to read Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot. The novel is his first since the Pulitzer Prize winning Middlesex in 2002 and on one level it is terribly, terribly clever. The central character goes to university, where she studies the intricate marriage plots common to many nineteenth century novels before becoming embroiled in an intricate marriage plot of her own. Eugenides plays with form and reveals his characters through the books they read. Like I said, it’s clever.
I’m much too ill-read and ill-bred to appreciate Eugenides’ dazzling literary range, which, I’m told by wiser owls than me, surpasses that of T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land.
There is, unquestionably, an element of Professor Eugenides showing off in places and you could read the novel as some sort of post-modern treatise. Indeed, the snootier critic insists that you can only understand the book if you are ‘au fait’ with words like ‘semiotic’ and ‘deconstruction’. Poppycock. The Marriage Plot, like Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides before it, is compulsive and instantly recognisable, describing suburban lives as they are lived the world over.
Eugenides is a normal if very gifted bloke. He spoke in London earlier this evening and he does a fine line in self-deprecation. He said of his Greco-Irish heritage: “I’m more Hillbilly than Mr Greek.” He is also honest about how laborious he finds writing. Like Phillip Roth, he writes hundreds of pages before he reaches the page one of the novel and even then the work remains exhausting. “Most of my work goes through multiple drafts,” he said. “4 or 5 drafts would be good; sometimes it goes through 10 or 12.”
He appears to be incredibly self-critical. After he had finished reading a long and funny passage from The Marriage Plot, I asked him if what he’d read felt and sounded right. He replied that writers never stop editing and that he was “no different”. Then, wry self-deprecation personified, he admitted that he’d strayed slightly from the published text when reading to us, mainly to abridge the selected chapter.
Sincerity lies beneath Eugenides’ sparkling sense of humour. He recalled how he tells his creative writing students to approach their work as if they were composing a letter to their best friend because “he’ll see if you’re faking it.” The Marriage Plot, Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides are, among other things, coming of age novels (albeit written for adults looking back in retrospect rather than adolescents in the moment) they are real.
Eugenides is often spoken of in tandem with America’s ultimate coming of age novelist J.D. Salinger. But, then again, who isn’t? For my money, Eugenides’ voice is closer to an American narrator greater even than Salinger. Harper Lee’s small-town “Scout” echoes down and between the lines of Eugenides’ suburban chronicles – the competing brotherhoods he describes, the nostalgia for place and period, and the spite that lurks like a snake in a storm drain. It’s narration so perfect, it is accentless. You scarcely notice the intellectual games that might have marred The Marriage Plot.
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