“It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep
recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College
Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads.
But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on
Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the
heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why “it
became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the
suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading
the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century
France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard
Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly
turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly
charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her
old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus—who’s been reading Christian mysticism and
generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is
destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in
this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real
world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school.
Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape
Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s
seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling
around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face
with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and
the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century
dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities
of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an
abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides
revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so.”
