The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Like many avid readers, I was a huge fan of Eugenides' Middlesex and anxiously awaited the arrival of this novel.  I enjoyed it, although not as much as I did Middlesex. 

The story is about a young woman named Madeleine, her boyfriend Leonard, and her platonic friend Mitchell.  The story follows them from their senior year at Brown University in the early 1980's  (and some flashbacks to earlier times) through their first few years after graduation.  Madeleine and Leonard meet in a class about literary criticism; the "marriage plot" in the title is an oft-returned-to basis for the classic novel that, the class suggests, is dead. After college, Mitchell goes to India to further explore his ideas around religion, while Madeleine and Leonard navigate post-college life together. 

I didn't know the book took place in Brown when I chose it - I picked it based on author alone. I was delighted to recognize the setting and to learn that Eugenides went there too.  His descriptions of the end of college were very well-done.  I so keenly remember the parties after college ended, and the friends who struggled in ways Madeleine and Leonard and Mitchell did.  This entire book was kind of what I had hoped Emperor's Children to be. 

And even thinking about the book as if I were not a Brown grad, I would have liked it.  Madeleine was a really well-constructed character, and it was hard to believe her author was male.  All the characters were well-developed, even some of the minor ones, like Madeleine's sister and her roommates. I also enjoyed reading about Mitchell's trip abroad, and appreciated Eugenides' description of Leonard's struggles with mental illness.

I am not sure everyone would like this book, but it did capture a very specific place and time; one I remember quite vividly.

Incidentally I caught an interview with Eugenides on NPR the other night, too.