Plot and The Marriage Plot

A few more words about plot, and that'll be it - I took some hits myself on this topic, when some reviewers of Exiles opined that the novel really didn't have a plot, just a series of things happening, and I took that pretty hard (vowed to stop reading reviews, probably won't have any more books to be reviewed anyway) because plot is really important to me and I thought Exiles had a pretty good, intricate plot - but it did get me thinking about the difference between events and plot. Think about plot in a movie or TV series, where the constraints are much tighter and the demand for entertainment is much stronger: as J has remarked, in the whole series The Wire there's probably not a single moment you'd want to, or even be able to cut: that's because every moment in the series contributes to advancing the plot or developing character. Novels have the space to do a little more: there can also be segments that establish a mood or sense of place (movies can do this visually, whereas novels have to use the same materials - words - to create mood, character, plot, everything). In a novel with a great plot, though, every "event" will move the story forward and develop the story - not just advance the story one more notch in time. If novels were just accruals of events, they would have no shape whatsoever, and no ending (some don't). Jeffrey Eugenides's "The Marriage Plot" is in danger, at the mid-point, of becoming too much of a series of events - it's not clear that all of them develop character or advance (that is, by adding to our knowledge, by slightly changing in retrospect all of the antecedent events) plot: For example just finished reading segment in which Madeleine's mother and sister come to visit her on the Cape, sister of verge of divorce (first time we meet her in the novel) and first time the two of them are meeting Madeleine's boyfriend, Leonard. And what of it? I don't come out of this feeling that I know much more about either of the two main characters, just that they've had an encounter with two new characters. We'll see where this goes - there have been many fine scenes in TMP and Eugenides writes in a thoroughly accessible and entertaining style - but wondering how he will shape his material and how he will have these diverse elements converge into a plot and a sense of an ending.