Reviewed by Paula McLain

The first time a friend convinced me to book a facial, I resisted. An hour of such focused ministration on so little surface area? C’mon. Eventually I surrendered — and then some. By the hour’s end, I was a total convert — and so it is with Jeffrey Eugenides’ sparkling new novel, The Marriage Plot. Its 400-plus pages render, with tender and obsessive attention, the romantic ups and downs of three Brown alums in the early 80s. It’s Reality Bites for the hyper-literate, as narrowly focused as Eugenides’ second novel, Middlesex, is rangy and explosive. But if you meet The Marriage Plot on its own fine terms, it’s an extraordinarily satisfying read.

The book opens on the morning of commencement, as Madeleine Hanna, an ordinarily squeaky clean and conscientious English major from Prettybrook, N.J., tries to bluff her way through breakfast with her parents, with a monumental hangover and a suspicious-looking stain on her rumpled, borrowed dress.

Madeleine has become an English major “for the purest and dullest of reasons: because she loved to read.” She’s worried she isn’t passionate or smart enough to hold her own in Semiotics 211 against the “spectral-looking” kids with their “Doc Martens and anarchist symbols.” One of these is Leonard Banks, whom Madeleine soon falls hard for. Leonard is hulking and reclusive, whip smart and painfully ironic, a “great big motherless boy.” To Madeleine, who’s obviously ripe for her own Mr. Rochester, Leonard is beyond irresistible.

Filling out this love triangle is Mitchell Grammaticus, who shares a hometown, Detroit, Mich., and several other salient biographical details with the author. A seeker, troubadour and would-be mystic, Mitchell pines for Madeleine with the same force and hopelessness with which Madeline pines for Leonard — the three locked in a whorl of thwarted desire that seems, to Mitchell, “fairly comical and Shakespearian.” Yet even as Mitchell travels the world trying to forget Madeleine, he’s self-aware enough to know that desire is bottomless and unquenchable by its very nature, and that his craving for Madeleine, his “ideal,” is very likely a “wish to possess her and, in doing so, gratify his ego … .”

Alas, poor Madeleine has none of Mitchell’s insight — as least not as it applies to her own life and decisions. From the moment Madeleine chooses Leonard, she blinds herself to reality. She has to, because Leonard isn’t a project she can resolve or a child she can nurse back to health, but a man held hostage by his own plunging brain chemistry.

Madeleine’s commitment to Leonard is willfully self-destructive. When she follows him to Cape Cod, where Leonard has landed a research fellowship with a pharmaceutical company, the two become effectively marooned. Madeleine’s once passionate if emotionally withholding scholar has become sexually inert, a sweaty lump “taking his lithium and Ativan, spreading a dollop of Preparation H between his buttocks every morning and night, drinking a glass of Metamucil with his morning O.J., swallowing, as needed, an anti-nausea pill he forgot the name of.”

Leonard is disgusted and saddened by this highly medicated version of himself, which he describes to Madeleine as “Dumb. Slow. Half-alive.” Unbeknownst to Madeleine and his doctors, he begins to experiment with his lithium dosage. The lively and lustful qualities Madeleine has so missed are momentarily restored — long enough for her to agree to marry him — but on their honeymoon in the South of France, Leonard careens wildly, unrecoverably over the abyss.

In the Victorian novels Madeleine adores, love and marriage aren’t at all simple. Middlemarch and The Portrait of a Lady “began with the traditional moves of the marriage plot — the suitors, the proposals, the misunderstandings — but after the wedding ceremony they kept on going. These novels followed their spirited, intelligent heroines … into their disappointing married lives, and it was here that the marriage plot reached its greatest artistic expression.” Similarly, The Marriage Plot is richer for its rejection of a traditional happy ending — of any ending, in fact, that isn’t fitting and meet for these particular characters.

In The Marriage Plot, Eugenides has turned away from flashier and more clearly provocative subjects like hermaphroditism and teen suicide in favor the infinitesimal complications of relationships. In doing so, he’s found the big in the small, and the effect is rather mind-blowing. At the apex of his mid-honeymoon breakdown, Leonard imagines lifting off the beach in the middle of the night: “he was suddenly in space … [f]or a minute, or ten minutes, or an hour — he didn’t know — he had drifted by Saturn, examining its rings, feeling the glow of the planet on his face, and then he was back on Earth, on the beach, in a world of trouble.” The reader feels a similar skewing of perspective in The Marriage Plot. It’s love up close and infinitely personal, and a gorgeous, gratifying read.

Paula McLain is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel, The Paris Wife. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with her children.