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 […]