Category: pulitzer

THE MARRIAGE PLOT by Jeffrey Eugenides

This book was four hundred pages long, and I only wish it was four hundred pages longer. This is because it is fabulous.

It is a classic boy-meets-girl-who-then-meets-this-other-boy story. It is however also very much concerned with what it means to write such a ‘classic’ story.

Our girl is Madeleine, who is attending a good university in the US, where she is studying Victorian literature under a certain Professor Saunders.

In Professor Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance.  In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about.  The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage.  Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel.  And divorce had undone it completely.  What would it matter whom Emma married if she could file for separation later? 

Eugenides attempts to answer this question by charting our contemporary Emma’s path through love and marriage. She has always been considered pretty and popular, and thus it is a shock to her when her first college boyfriend, Dabney, is better looking than she is:

Underneath this pleasure . . . was a fierce need to enfold Dabney and siphon off his strength and beauty. It was all very primitive and evolutionary and felt fantastic. The problem was that she hadn’t been able to allow herself to enjoy Dabney or even to exploit him a little, but had had to go and be a total girl about it and convince herself that she was in love with him. Madeleine required emotion, apparently. She disapproved of the idea of meaningless, extremely satisfying sex.

She meets a boy named Mitchell, who falls madly in love with her. One night she comes and sits on his bed, hoping he will make a move, and when he is too frightened too, is rather hurt, and decides to keep him at arm’s length. Some time later, after one very flirtatious night, she picks a fight with him.

She’d been on the verge of calling Mitchell to apologize when she’d received a letter from him, a highly detailed, cogently argued, psychologically astute, quietly hostile four-page letter, in which he called her a ‘cocktease’ and claimed that her behaviour that night had been ‘the erotic equivalent of bread and circus, with just the circus’

They stop speaking (poor Mitchell! We return to the night she sat on his bed multiple times, with multiple other endings) and Madeline falls in love with the mysterious Leonard. He has serious manic depression, but SPOILER ALERT! she marries him on one of his upswings, immediately after graduation, and then has to live with him through his downswings. He eventually leaves her. Mitchell returns on the scene and – you’ll just have to read the book to find out what happens then.

THE MARRIAGE PLOT is a wonderful, old-school, Victorian novel, which just happens to have been written by someone alive today. I found it very accurate both about awkward modern condom conversations and traditional old heartbreak.

What blows my mind in particular is how well Madeline is drawn – how female she feels – given that Eugenides is a man. It is wildly successful imagining of another gender. The book is also very funny. Here he is, for example, on Madeline’s mother, Phyllida:

Phyllida’s hair was where her power resided. It was expensively set into a smooth dome, like a band shell for the presentation of that long-running act, her face.

On bad dish soap in Paris:

European dish soap was either eco-friendly or tariff-protected

One more, which is painfully true:

Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.

Oh alright, since you are begging, one last little bit, that is not funny, but is I think just lovely, accomplished writing. This is when Madeline’s high school girlfriends are visiting her:

Then the Lawrenceville girls left and Madeleine became intelligent again, as lonely, misfortunate, and inward as a governess. She rejoined Mitchell on the porch, where the sun-warmed paperbacks and iced coffee awaited her.

That’s so good that for some reason it actually makes me feel kind of bad.

THE BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO by Junot Diaz

“Of what import are brief, nameless lives . . . to Galactus?”
(Fantastic Four, Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, Vol 1, No 49, April 1966)

And so begins this wonderful novel. Followed by, bizarrely, an entire poem by Derek Walcott, an important Caribbean poet.

This gives you a kind of sense of what a seriously loopy book this is, verging wildly from the highly literary, to pop culture, from English to Spanish, from Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic to contemporary New Jersey.

Oscar Wao is a fat guy who loves sci-fi to an unhealthy degree, and is permanently in hope of finding love with a lady. His story is intercut with that of his sister, who flees the US for their ancestral homeland of Dominican Republic, and with the stories of his grandfather and mother, and of what made them flee the DR (as he calls it) for America.

Oscar’s grandfather was tortured and murdered by the Trujillo regime, because he refused to offer his oldest daughter up freely to Trujillo to be raped. Oscar’s mother, the youngest daughter, was thus left an orphan. She grew up and was eventually forced to flee the DR after getting entangled in a stupid relationship with the husband of Trujillo’s sister. Oscar’s own story eventually leads him back to the DR, where he finally finds love (with an elderly prostitute) and is eventually murdered by her boyfriend’s heavies.

Actually as I write it out it sounds like rather a miserable and melodramatic tale. But so sparkling and irreverent is the voice of the novelist, so sure the comedy, so accurate the observation – especially of the world of fat dorks – that in fact the book is a non-stop delight.

I was particularly struck by how Diaz managed to mix together the many aspects of his life – first and third world, pop and literary culture – into one coherent identity. This is something I certainly can’t seem to achieve.

The poem that begins the novel, after talking about Derek Walcott’s varied backgrounds, ends:

“I’m just a red nigger who love the sea,
I had a sound colonial education,
I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me,
and either I’m nobody, or I’m a nation”

PS. Zimbabwean? Want to feel a certain someone’s not that bad? Check out Trujillo’s dictatorship here. He eventually died in an assassination, but I must point out he had serious prostate problems too. . . Holding thumbs!