Battle of the Books: Eugenides and The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides's "The Marriage Plot" is not as self-consciously literary as his first novel, The Virgin Suicides, nor as grandly ambitious as his second, Middlesex, but just a good gossipy novel about a time and place: college students (brown) circa 1980, post sexual revolution, post co-ed dorms, but pre-Internet,vcell phone, social media, atms, easy travel, etc. His main characters, particularly the protagonist, Madeleine, are English majors at Brown of various persuasions, and much of the satiric humor in the novel is at the expense the the deconstructionists who reigned in that era - they were the cutting edge, the ones who, as Eugenides neatly explains, glorified the reader at the expense of the writer, emphasized "text" rather than novel or story or poem, were against interpretation rather then for exegesis. As Madeleine realizes: they glorifed readers because they themselves were readers. Well, Eugenides is a writer, and here's his sweet revenge - and in fact he's writing exactly the kind of book that the decons would despise or ignore - just a story, lots of sex, lots of relationships good and bad and tumultuous, just as life is then or now for 20-somethings in college. His heroine, Madeleine, is much like a Franzen heroine: wealthy, pretty, athletic, Ivy, in other words very privileged, but also pretty miserable and torn about what to do with her life, frustrated that so much of her life is tied in with having a boyfriend (that's what makes novels tick, to a degree) but unsure where to go or what to do on her own - she's hardly, at least 100 pp in, any sort of feminist avatar. So we'll see where he takes it - more than almost any other writer I've delved into recently, he's conscious of the literary tradition all around him - his characters, as noted, are English majors and their conversation is peppered with literary references, and he tends to describe a room not by its draperies and color schemes (cf James) but by the books on the shelf. Where does Eugenides fit in among the literary lions he's got his sites on? I think he doesn't really want to fit in at all - like his heroine, he turns his back on texts and anti-texts and the difficult classics his characters (and thereby he) quote from at will. He's just telling a story in the most traditional of all genres, as noted in the title of this novel (which is the title of Madeleine's senior thesis).