Praise for The Marriage Plot
“Wry, engaging and beautifully constructed.” —William Deresiewicz, The New York Times Book Review
“[The Marriage Plot] is sly, fun entertainment, a confection for English majors and book lovers . . . Mr. Eugenides brings the period into bright detail—the brands of beer, the music, the affectations—and his send-ups of the pretensions of chic undergraduate subcultures are hilarious and charmingly rendered . . . [His] most mature and accomplished book so far” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
“No one's more adept at channeling teenage angst than Jeffrey Eugenides. Not even J. D. Salinger . . . It's in mapping Mitchell's search for some sort of belief that might fill the spiritual hole in his heart and Madeleine's search for a way to turn her passion for literature into a vocation that this novel is at its most affecting, reminding us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love and in love with books and ideas.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
“This is a story about being young and bright and lost, a story Americans have been telling since Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Our exceptionally well-read but largely untested graduates still wonder: How should I live my life? What can I really believe in? Whom should I love?” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“If there is a writer to whom Eugenides appears connected, it is not Wallace but Jonathan Franzen. They are less than a year apart in age, and while Franzen got a head start, the two, who are both with the same publisher, are on similar publishing schedules. Last year, Franzen's Freedom was a bestseller; like The Marriage Plot, it's a robust, rich story of adults in a love triangle.” —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
“Eugenides steers effortlessly through the intertwining tales of his three protagonists, shifting seamlessly among their three viewpoints and overlapping their stories in a way that's easy to follow and never labored. His prose is smooth but never flashy, and his eye for the telling detail or gesture is keen. Slowly but confidently he fleshes out his characters, and as they slowly accrue weight and realism, readers will feel increasingly opinionated about the choices they make . . .” —Patrick Condon, San Francisco Chronicle
“Eugenides, a master storyteller, has a remarkable way of twisting his narrative in a way that seems effortless; taking us backward and forward in time to fill in details . . . For these characters, who don't live in Jane Austen's world, no simple resolution will do for them in the world. And yet you close this book with immense satisfaction—falling in love just a bit yourself, with a new kind of marriage plot.” —Moira Macdonald, Seattle Times
“Jeffrey Eugenides, in his glorious new novel, mines our thrall and eternal unease around sex, love and marriage . . . At its core, The Marriage Plot is besotted with books, flush with literary references. It seems coyly designed to become the volume all former English majors take to their breasts.” —Karen Long, The Plain Dealer
“There has been a storybook quality to much American fiction recently—larger-than-life, hyper-exuberant, gaudy like the superhero comics and fairy tales that have inspired it. By sticking to ordinary human truth, Eugenides has bucked this trend and written his most powerful book yet.” —Zachary Lazar, Newsday
05/15/2017
Pulitzer Prize winner Eugenides, whose novels have also been runners-up for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, now comes up with a first collection of stories dealing with sexual confusion, adolescent angst, and identity crisis, as when a poet who feels left out of the financial boom becomes an embezzler.
The theme of complaint extends beyond the title story, but for listeners the key takeaway is the word “fresh.” Jeffrey Eugenides’s fresh writing merges the mundane with the meaningful. “Airmail,” with a plot that fuses amoebic dysentery with spiritual enlightenment, showcases his originality and—since he also narrates it—his ability to navigate multiple accents and personalities. The audio production does have flaws, though. Cynthia Nixon appears miscast in “The Baster,” a story with a male first-person narrator. Still, her performances of it and her other story, “Complainers,” are stellar. Ari Fliakos narrates the remaining stories with good instincts and character interplay, but a wavering Irish accent injures his efforts. These complaints should not deter listeners from hearing the more profound stories in this collection. K.W. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
The theme of complaint extends beyond the title story, but for listeners the key takeaway is the word “fresh.” Jeffrey Eugenides’s fresh writing merges the mundane with the meaningful. “Airmail,” with a plot that fuses amoebic dysentery with spiritual enlightenment, showcases his originality and—since he also narrates it—his ability to navigate multiple accents and personalities. The audio production does have flaws, though. Cynthia Nixon appears miscast in “The Baster,” a story with a male first-person narrator. Still, her performances of it and her other story, “Complainers,” are stellar. Ari Fliakos narrates the remaining stories with good instincts and character interplay, but a wavering Irish accent injures his efforts. These complaints should not deter listeners from hearing the more profound stories in this collection. K.W. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine
★ 2017-06-20
Well-off, well-intentioned people find their just-so lives upended, often in curious ways, in this first collection of short stories by Eugenides (The Marriage Plot, 2011, etc.).Two of the stories here are close cousins to Eugenides' novels: "Air Mail" features Mitchell, the lovelorn spiritual seeker in The Marriage Plot, battling a case of dysentery in Thailand, while "The Oracular Vulva" concerns a researcher studying the same intersexual characteristics that stoked the plot of Middlesex (2002). But neither of those stories reads like a lesser dry run for a more serious work, and the collection throughout is marked by a rich wit, an eye for detail, and a sense of the absurd. The plots often involve relationships hitting the skids, as in "Early Music," in which a couple watches their artistic ambitions crash into the brick wall of fiscal responsibility, or "Find the Bad Guy," about a green-card marriage gone awry. (The contents of the narrator's pockets tell a pathetic tale in itself: "loose change, 5-Hour Energy bottle, and an Ashley Madison ad torn from some magazine.") Eugenides enjoys putting his characters into odd predicaments: "Baster" centers on a woman pursuing a pregnancy via the title's kitchen gadget, while the writer who narrates "Great Experiment" contemplates defrauding his wealthy but stingy employer, using de Tocqueville's writings as a rationalization. But Eugenides never holds up his characters for outright mockery, and the two fine new stories that bookend the collection gracefully navigate darker territory: "Complainers" is narrated by a woman confronting her longtime friend's dementia, and "Fresh Complaint" turns on a young Indian-American woman's provocative scheme to escape an arranged marriage. We humans are well-meaning folk, Eugenides means to say, but life tends to force us into bad behavior. Sprightly or serious, Eugenides consistently writes about complex lives with depth and compassion.
