Plot, doo-wop ballads, and The Marriage Plot

As noted from friend PP the other day while running, all love songs come down to this, as captured in the great, under-appreciated doo-wop ballad Gloria (not the familiar GLORIA, but the earlier song by the Cadillacs): "Gloria, it's not Marie/It's Gloria, it's not Sherry/It's Gloria/But she's not in love with me." That says it all. Yet that statement of yearning and loss is a mood, an emotion, a state of mind - but not a plot. That mood, powerful though it is, can sustain a song or a poem, maybe a story, but not a novel, which brings us to the dangerous straits Jeffrey Eugenides is traveling in "The Marriage Plot." The danger is that, provocative title aside, his novel has mood and event, plenty of events, but not really a plot. A plot, in essence, needs to have a shape and dimension, and over the course of a plot the characters or at least one character has to learn and to grow but not just because of the passage of time or the occurrence of random events but because of the events, predicaments, situations, problems that the character has to face and to overcome or solve or not. I've noted in earlier posts that The Marriage Plot is a great antidote to the daunting book I read previously, James's The Ambassadors, which for all its flaws and tics and annoyances had a well-designed plot in which the protagonist, Strether, embarks on a mission to "save" a young man and ends up becoming much like the young man and betraying the person who sent him on the mission. The Marriage Plot, so far, is about a young woman graduating from college (Brown) who is in love with a fellow student who is brilliant but mentally troubled and is the object of the love of another fellow student, also brilliant but socially awkward. The lives of the three characters keep moving along, sometimes together and sometimes in parallel lines, but it's not clear, at least yet, the degree to which the characters actually affect one another. The main character, Madeleine, is growing and maturing through the course of the novel - so far, the few months after graduation - but it's an intellectual maturation, based on her reading, her studies, and, at the point I've just reached, a conference she goes to on feminism and Victorian fiction. As a long-ago English major, I actually love reading about her courses and her thesis and her thoughts - an incidental pleasure of this novel - and I think a large part of Eugenides's readership also finds the academic matter smart and enticing - he's read a lot of the books we've read, has smart things to say about them, and is pretty good at skewering the academic fadism that swept and still sweeps campuses like Brown - easy target, true, but a palpable hit.