The Marriage Plot

Part I

Jeffrey Eugenides’ first novel The Virgin Suicides, published in 1993, is not only a masterpiece but a pivotal one in the resurgence of one strand of the American novel. A few years later when the late, great David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest (1996) it was Jeffrey Eugenides whose blurb could be read on the back of that massive and magnificent tome proclaiming ‘He da man.’ David Foster Wallace, far and away the greatest writer of his generation, committed suicide in 2008, having endured many years of excruciating depression. In Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot one of the main characters wears a signature bandanna as Foster Wallace did, is a man of exceptional intelligence as he was (literary genius aside) and struggles with the ‘sheer, fall, no man fathomed’ mountain of melancholy, as he did. The internet speculation has gone into overdrive.

They were always a natural coupling, these two literary masters, if only because the contrast between them was so complementary. Eugenides has always been Marvell to Foster Wallace’s Donne, Julian Barnes to his Martin Amis, the one who wrote the perfect compact literary masterpiece, at once accessible and elusive, that illuminated a way of seeing while the other created the massive cathedral, full of labyrinths and byways and gargoyles that seemed to have wills of their own.

The Virgin Suicides is written in a choric voice, using that rarest of all narrative voices, the first person plural, and it is the strangest kind of collective elegy on the part of this group of men, the ‘we’ who are the narrators, of how a group of young girls topped themselves. The book is velvet black in texture and frequently hilarious in the way it traces the curves of the poignancies it evokes. It is dazzlingly original in the way it achieves a sustained lyrical power in the face of material which would seem wildly improbable if Eugenides' achievement did not make this unstable hymn to love and death seem like the inevitable expression of the contradictions with which we venerate and desecrate the image of the young girl.

The Virgin Suicides justifies its every word and it will be, if there is any justice to literary posterity, read forever, even if it inevitably looks minor in relation to the greatest work of Foster Wallace.

The one thing Eugenides had published since The Virgin Suicides was Middlesex (2002) which explored hermaphroditism, the Armenian genocide and the realities of growing up in Detroit in a style which was supple, satisfying and what Roland Barthes used to call ‘readerly’ (by which he almost meant readable in a risk free way). Middlesex was a fine novel, with some quantity of far-out subject matter, but it was a departure from the world of strenuous experimentation The Virgin Suicides made look easy.

By contrast, the closest thing David Foster Wallace ever wrote to the pellucid brilliancies of The Virgin Suicides, with its concomitant inevitable rhythms, was the short story ‘Forever Overhead’ which, more particularly, exhibited a transfigured realism that looked like an easy lilting classic style but in fact had a concentration that was the opposite of a soft focus slap-it-all-down naturalism.

Elsewhere Foster Wallace remained true to the burden of making it all new, whatever it cost him. The stories of Oblivion (2004) are ghastly in their vision and at the far limit of readability in the uncompromising difficulty of their execution. Though it has to be said that his posthumous novel The Pale King, published this year, is as often funny and fresh as it is forbidding and impossible.

Part II

All of which is by way of preamble to what, rightly or wrongly, has been branded Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel about David Foster Wallace. (Eugenides has denied the intention though in a book that has one of the main characters who palpably shares a background with the author, it must have been at the very least obvious to him that the David Foster Wallace identification would be made and he could, easily enough, have taken steps to prevent this.)

There’s no doubting that the man can write like magic. The novelist has the effortless mastery of the sentence to capture anything on earth: the unspeakable horrors of family life, the breathless intelligence of the brilliant young, all the confusions of an eroticism that’s only just waking up to itself, the power of the search for the Spirit that blows who knows where, the slime of deprivation, the deep and terrible ghastliness of the mind that knows its own disintegration.

The Marriage Plot is the story of a young woman, bright, pretty, upper middle class and just discovering her capacity for life and love as she comes to the end of her first stint of studying fiction, and especially those platonic ideas of readability, the nineteenth century novels, at Brown University.

In a class she meets a guy who chews tobacco and wears a bandanna and who is — palpably and, very effectively in terms of characterisation — what we vulgarly mean by a genius, the brightest person in any possible room.

She also meets, and is at the edge of fooling around with, another young man (whose name has the same number of syllables as the author), who has some kind of Greek Orthodox background, comes from Detroit, and is by way of being a seeker after religious knowledge. It is he whom the girl initially takes home to meet her oh-so-cultivated Mum and Dad.

But it’s the genius (a scientist) that she settles with and it’s he who turns out to be, for all his ability and brilliance and ability to net girls, the one who suffers from a severe form of manic depression.

In practice The Marriage Plot, which is very artful in the way it doffs its cap to nineteenth century precedents uses a parallel structure with one part of the novel centred on the girl and her demon-haunted lover and the other treating the peripatetic adventures of the seeker who also — that’s part of the weird compelling burden of this four hundred page novel — burns with the conviction that he should marry the girl. This is something that she is not altogether unaware of and not unattracted to.

So The Marriage Plot is a novel about the horrors of being stuck — kind of in love — with someone who suffers from depression. And the parallel universe of pining for a girl (that girl, the melancholic’s lover) while trying to come to terms with the idea of ‘the Good’ and how best to track it down.

It is difficult to account for the cascading power and disappointment that this long awaited novel by an undoubted American master brings.

Eugenides is superb at capturing the idiom and idiolect of all the characters he glances at. An old priest on celibacy, an establishment woman confronting the travail of what a daughter might marry into, a malicious sister on the prowl. He certainly has the words for all these people and there is an exhilaration in this novel when he allows them to let rip.

The difficulty is when it comes to his central characters and his ability not only to inhabit them but to dramatise the interior lives that are meant to be the essence of the book.

The depressive genius, for instance — whether there’s a roman a clef logic at work or not — is brilliantly observed, he talks exactly as he should (at once impressively and horrifyingly) but in an odd kind of way he is done ‘in the flat’. We know all about his intimate life, his suffering and his power of empathy, but he remains at some level a case study by a novelist of genius. (The fact that he may also be a case study of a novelist of genius only adds a local inhabitation and a name to a principle of prurience that is at work in the characterisation anyway. There is a denial of sympathy in this portrait of a manic depressive which is weird given the intelligence evident in the delineation and the piercing awareness of the predicament. It remains an engrossed study).

And something similar is true of the whole of The Marriage Plot. We like the heroine, we cling to the prettiness of the characterisation, just as we abide with the yearning (for God and the Girl) that distinguishes the guy who is a Safe Bet.

But their vivacity is much more skin deep than it appears. The Marriage Plot is terrifically kicked on by the brilliance of its incidental dialogue and the sheer authority of Eugenides' prose which gives a patina of conviction to everything he touches.

But The Marriage Plot is much less securely shaped than it should be. It is almost as if the high and mighty Eugenides has fallen for the fallacy that the shapelessness of Life is its own guarantee of authenticity.

Not in art it’s not. Far too much of this remarkably intelligent book is given over to a sort of soapy slackness of dramatic outline that never allows the material to fully flame into life because there is not enough dramatic organisation.

The Marriage Plot fails, for all its powers and glories, because it doesn’t have enough plot, either in the overarching sense or at the micro level. Okay, we have a girl who falls for someone who is manic depressive. Okay, we have the empathic realisation on her part and on the Other Guy’s that they are made for each other. But these two strands of narrative are never pressurised into life—that is to say, the life of art.

At some level Eugenides seems conscious of this which is why we get various cynicisms (from La Rochefoucauld and Trollope) adorning the book by way of epigraph and pointer. And, hey, there’s the title ‘The Marriage Plot’: marriage as delusive conspiracy as well as marriage as arbitrary narratalogical device.

But if Eugenides wanted to highlight these things he should have risked his arm and written — just maybe — a shorter, tighter, more formalised book, even a more post-modern one — and one with the courage of its own ironies. That, one suspects, would have done greater justice to his own genius and to the perturbed spirit of his ghostly comrade in arms, the incomparable David Foster Wallace.