interviewmagazine.comJeffrey Eugenides began his new novel, The Marriage Plot, with a single idea: his female protagonist, an English student at Brown University in the early 1980s, is discovering love while the postmodern theorists she reads in her classes are deconstructing the very concept. The book, as he conceived it, would dramatize her struggle to live out the ideas she gathered from the 19th century authors she read—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, the main practitioners of the classic “marriage plot” in fiction—as those ideas were being attacked from all sides. As Madeleine falls in love with one classmate (the manic-depressive Leonard) and endlessly toys with another (the nice guy Mitchell), Eugenides explores the complex connections between our reading and our romantic lives.
The amusing scenes of impressionable undergraduates mimicking their professor’s postmodern vocabulary will be recognizable to any McGill student, and are indeed drawn from life: Eugenides himself was an English major at Brown just as French semiotic theory was beginning to establish itself on American campuses in a big way.
“I took semiotics in the way Madeleine does, to sort of figure out what all the fuss was about,” he said. He admired the rigour of the theory, and the way writers like Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Roland Barthes could point to certain structures that always seemed to be at work in literature. “But I was also distrustful of the way people were parroting the terminology right away and almost adopting it like a creed,” he said.
The Marriage Plot came out of that lingering ambivalence. Eugenides does ridicule deconstruction and its self-appointed apostles: Madeleine’s professor, a crotchety late-life convert from an earlier school of criticism, opens his classes with convoluted, Sphinx-like riddles; the most outspoken student, Thurston, is a poseur who claims to have difficulty introducing himself on the first day of class “because the whole idea of social introductions is so problematized.” But Eugenides points out that he also respects deconstruction and has use for its conceptual tools. “I have to look at how much these semiotic ideas, or at least the people associated with them, have affected me,” he said, pointing out that he wrote his last novel, Middlesex, after reading a book by Foucault. “I look at that, and I see here that I’ve written about it again, and I realize there is some influence in me.”
In this book, undoubtedly the author’s most autobiographical work, the character whose life most closely resembles Eugenides’ own is Mitchell Grammaticus. Like his creator, Mitchell is a Greek-American from Detroit who is strongly interested in questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and what it means to be a good person. When Madeleine chooses Leonard over him, Mitchell embarks on a spiritual pilgrimage that takes him from France to Ireland to Greece and, finally, to Mother Teresa’s mission in Calcutta (where Eugenides volunteered when he was Mitchell’s age). After he flees India, discovering himself unfit to lead a life of such moral perfection and physical deprivation, Mitchell returns home to win Madeleine’s heart one final time.
Eugenides has taken some criticism for presenting Mitchell’s spirituality as a mere “sublimation of his desire for Madeleine,” as William Deresiewicz wrote in the New York Times Book Review. But the author, who for the first time isn’t reading the reviews, defended his depiction of Mitchell, saying that Mitchell’s romantic frustrations lead him to hate his own body, and to want to escape it. “I remember being your age: the physical agony of being a 22-year-old male is not insignificant,” he said. “It’s akin to wanting to have a mystical union with God.” While such a sexual motivation doesn’t invalidate Mitchell’s religious inclinations, Eugenides says, it provides a secondary fuel.
Following the Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, a sprawling, multi-generational account of a Greek-American family in Detroit, Eugenides wanted his new work to be more focused. After three years of writing a novel that would have been limited to one party on one night, Eugenides found that the love travails of Madeleine, one of the characters in that story, deserved a novel of their own. The Marriage Plot begins on the morning of the three main characters’ graduation from Brown, and ends about one year later.
After leaving India, Mitchell realizes he has to give up his aspirations to be either a monk or a theologian. One possibility, Eugenides admits, is that he becomes a writer—perhaps even a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Though he already knew he wanted to write novels, Eugenides says he probably didn’t know while he was at Brown that he would one day write a novel about his time there. All the more impressive, then, is his evocative description of campus life and romance in the early 1980s. He says that he chose to set his novels then, rather than today, not because it would help him avoid the messy issues (for a realistic novelist) of the Internet and text messaging, but because it was the campus life he knew. Now 51 years old, Eugenides writes in a lovely studio at his new house in Princeton, and sometimes in an upstairs bedroom that he says has a “more appropriate amount of deprivation.”
When asked how he writes about female experience, Eugenides says he starts by never thinking about something called “the female experience,” and instead just tries to understand his characters as human beings reacting to real-life situations. Sometimes, though, he asks for help, like when he depicts Madeleine inserting a diaphragm before having sex with Leonard. “I can ask a woman about that, how you have to bend it to get it in,” Eugenides recalls, trailing off at the end. Digressing for a moment, he has a question for me. “Do girls even have diaphragms anymore? Have you ever seen one?” And so Jeffrey Eugenides, 30 years out of college, continues his research.
