The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides, 4th Estate, $29.99

***

Jeffrey Eugenides has written two of the finest American novels of the last twenty years. Expectations for his third, The Marriage Plot, are predictably Himalayan. It is a grave disappointment.

Its predecessors – The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex – couldn’t have been more different in tone and form. What united them were Eugenides’ searching emotional intelligence, mercurial lyricism, and his talent for writing dialogue of such compressed perception and dramatic flair the greatest playwrights on earth might envy it. Both novels took seemingly dead traditions in Western literature and breathed the zeitgeist into them in a totally pneumatic way.

The striking originality of his masterpiece, The Virgin Suicides, rested on its use of the choric first person – a device that echoes ancient Greek tragedy. A group of middle-aged men lamented five teenage sisters from their affluent suburb. All five inexplicably, almost ritually, killed themselves. Eugenides created an erotic elegy that flaunted a desperate kind of antagonism between grief and desire, fact and fetish; between the material comfort of the picket fence and the wilderness of despair behind it; between boys who never grew up inside, and girls who slipped into oblivion to avoid their gaze.

By contrast, the Pulitzer-winning Middlesex took up the Homeric epic and refashioned it as a spirited Bildungsroman, an upbeat odyssey across contemporary gender. The hero/heroine was a hermaphrodite, struggling with a culture that insists on a strict division between the sexes. Despite its gorgeous, sweeping historical set-pieces, page-turning domestic drama and exuberant narrative voice, the originality here was thematic rather than formal. Middlesex was written before the intersex community became part of the broader GLBTI political movement, and the novel proved hugely influential as consciousness-raising literature. That Oprah loved it, too, didn’t hurt one bit.

The Marriage Plot turns to the 19th-century novel and re-works it among undergrads in the early 1980s, just as semiotic theory took its vice-like hold of literature departments. It delivers a classic love triangle, with suitably byzantine courtship rituals – but the stakes are quite different from those in Austen or George Eliot or Henry James. As Madeleine Hanna, the spoilt rich girl who’s writing her thesis on the death of ‘the marriage plot’ muses: Would anyone care whom Jane Austen’s Emma married if she could get a divorce at the drop of a hat?

Eugenides opts for the third person narrative, divested of omniscience and redirected at shifting interior perspectives. Madeleine and her two suitors – Mitchell Grammaticus and Leonard Bankhead – all get to take the reins, but Madeleine stands out, and you hunger for more of her.

The first hundred pages move like low-fat ice-cream at a Weight Watchers conference. They’re an utterly guiltless pleasure, and will especially delight anyone who studied English at university because they enjoyed reading novels – only to be forced to wade through turbulent flurries of theoretical nonsense from whichever French madman happened to be flavour of the month.

Madeleine is just such a person. Despite her catholic tastes in fiction, she takes Semiotics 211 anyway because all the cool kids are doing it. She’s soon up to her neck in Derrida and Lyotard and Barthes and Foucault. Through Madeleine, Eugenides pans for gold in postmodern theory, filtering out the dross and finding specks of beauty. Here’s Madeleine on Umberto Eco’s The Role of the Reader:

“It hadn’t done much for Madeleine. She wasn’t that interested, as a reader, in the reader … Madeleine had a feeling that most semiotic theorists had been unpopular as children, often bullied or overlooked, and so had directed their lingering rage onto literature. They wanted to demote the author. They wanted a book, that hard-won, transcendent thing, to be a text, contingent, indeterminate, and open for suggestions. They wanted the reader to be the main thing. Because they were readers.”

Her mordant dismissal of po-mo theory as a philosophical Revenge of the Nerds is undercut when she falls, as Barbara Cartland might say, “madly in love” with the charismatic Leonard Bankhead. Madeleine moons over him, while obsessing over Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. She identifies with Barthes’ revelation that the condition of the lover today is one “of extreme solitude”.

Leonard nastily throws Barthes back at Madeleine mid-fling. After a post-coital ‘I love you’, he flicks to a damning page and makes her read it: “The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal, but to the repeated utterance of the love cry. Suddenly Madeleine’s happiness diminished, usurped by a feeling of peril. She wished she weren’t naked. She narrowed her shoulders and covered herself with the bed-sheet as she obediently read on. Once the first avowal has been made, “I love you” has no meaning whatever …” Riveting stuff.

Unfortunately, Leonard Bankhead appears to be a tacky palimpsest for the dead writer David Foster Wallace. Eugenides’ public demurrals of this are disingenuous. Leonard is ultra-bright, and like Wallace a polymath with a keen interest in science. He’s unkempt and habitually wears a bandana, as with the most famous author photo of Wallace. He chews tobacco, also like Wallace. He suffers from severe depression, again like Wallace. The double trochee of Leonard’s name echoes Wallace’s – just as the third wheel in the love triangle, Mitchell Grammaticus, is an authorial self-portrait whose name echoes Eugenides’ own, syllable for syllable and stress for stress. In a book about semiotics, the signs are all too clear.

This is intensely problematic, but wouldn’t matter so much if the novel’s ice-cream didn’t begin to melt halfway through. Eugenides has a fair bit to say about the nature of reading and writing, about religion and science and mental illness, about the haunted house of unrequited love, and how love, requited, sometimes isn’t enough. Yet his insights increasingly fail to be dramatised through the narrative and characters, and the prose style becomes rushed and sludgy, all the chocolate chips sinking to the bottom.

So we must suffer through such bland platitudes as: “It was something every child knew how to do, maintain a direct and full connection to the world. Somehow you forgot about it as you grew up, and had to learn it again.” Or the illogical modifiers in the following sentence: “In his twenty-two years on the planet, Mitchell had done few of these things before and some of them not at all.” Or small factual inaccuracies that detract from character (a teenaged Leonard supposedly applies pHisoderm to his acne in the late 70s, when the sale and distribution of that product were prohibited by the Food and Drug Administration due to cancer fears. Leonard, a hypochondriac, would surely know this).

Most of Eugenides’ themes feel recycled, and have been better done elsewhere. DeLillo’s Underworld offers a much more layered treatment of mysticism in the postmodern age than the Grammaticus subplot does. The incandescent tragicomedies of David Foster Wallace are wilder, truer and more humane on depressive illness. That leaves Madeleine and her incisively drawn Boston family – her indomitable, cut-glass mother Phyllida, her competitive father, her ex-hippy sister – as the star attraction, and they grow more and more distant as the universe of the novel expands and begins to freeze over.

It is one thing to show us how, in matters of the heart, anticipation is just as important as consummation. It is quite another to write a novel that chats you up, turns you on, gets you into bed and then, on the pretence of going to the toilet, makes a hasty exit through the bathroom window.

 

[A version of this review appeared in The Age, 22/10/11.]