Oh wow, this is great book. But look, it won the Pulitzer Prize, so you already knew that right off the cover! The characters in The Marriage Plot are so real and detailed. The depth of the world Eugenides has created reminds me of Freedom by Jonathan Franzen; so clear and intriguing. I'm going to bet I'm not the first one to make that observation- I came across both these books first as extracts published in the New Yorker. Both times a chapter was published that described a character so fascinating and lucidly described that I was completely hooked and counted down the months til publication of the whole book. In the case of Freedom it was the opening chapter about Patty Berglund. In the case of The Marriage Plot, the chapter about Mitchell Grammaticus in India.
My only issue with this book is that I ultimately felt that the treatment of Leonard was unfair. I felt like his story just stopped... meanly. His mental illness didn't deserve such casting-off. It was a coincidence that on Sunday I was listening to Common Knowledge on Radio National and they were discussing novel endings. The panel seemed to think that the ending of the Marriage Plot was outstandingly good. I thought it was one of the weaker parts. It just... ended. The end. I thought it was a good example of Kafka's idea- referenced in this article from the New York Review of Books that the panel on Common Knowledge was discussing- that beyond a certain point a writer might decide to finish his or her novel at any moment, with any sentence; it really was an arbitrary question, like where to cut a piece of string.
But such good characters.
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