Poor Jeffrey Eugenides. Every book he writes is going to be “good, but it’s not Middlesex” at best to me. It’s not fair to the man. He’s a great writer, but damn was Middlesex a fucking masterpiece. I keep chasing that high. I had the same thing with Michael Chabon; my first experience was with the author’s best, most-intriguing-subject-matter book that was tailor made for me, so everything else was going to suffer by comparison. Any writer would be lucky to have one Middlesex in […]
I swear I didn’t ctrl-z my Ian McEwan review
Oh, Jeffrey Eugenides, will I ever judge a book of yours fairly after you’ve written Middlesex? This is something of a theme in my reviews in part because I’ll buy books based on the strength of the author’s name if I’ve fallen in love with one of their works, and then they end up in my “I’ll get around to it” pile. But man, I honestly feel guilty with Eugenides because Middlesex is so damn perfect nothing will ever measure up. It’s a top five […]
There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel.
My friend M. found the beginning of this book to be quite pretentious. And it is. It’s pretentious AF for the first 60 or so pages. And it’s hard to read pretention too. The first few pages, especially, seem to drag and serve no purpose other than to make you re-think your decision to read it. But, I’m here to tell you that, while the first part of The Marriage Plot is definitely pretentious, it’s pretentious for a reason. The pretention of Madeline and her […]
Ignore the Haters, This Book Rocks
Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot is set in 1982 and follows three co‑eds as they graduate from Brown and embark on their first year post‑college. Madeleine Hanna is the gal at the center of this love triangle, an English major in love with the great Victorian romance novels, rather than the hip semiotics novels that her peers love. On the other two points are Mitchell Grammaticus, who is into Christian mysticism, and Leonard Bankhead, a manic‑depressive scientist. Eugenides’s writing is beautiful, but not for the […]