Why The Marriage Plot is the perfect antidote to James's The Ambassadors

Holding off judgement for the moment on Jeffrey Eugenides's novel "The Marriage Plot," but started on it the other day for two reasons primarily: I really liked his two previous novels, The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, though they were quite different, in fact in part because they were quite different, but both captured a real sense of time and place, mostly (particularly in Virgin) suburban Detroit in the late 70s during a time of change (Middlesex had a number of other European settings as well), and, second reason, I was (and am) really curious to see how if Eugenides can capture the same sense of place for Providence in the 1980s, the setting of The Marriage Plot. It's a campus novel, the campus being Brown - I was here at the time, but not at Brown - and am curious to see if his Providence rings true as a place, if he captures the sense of Providence at that time (pre cell phones social media the web the net et al), and if he captures the world of American Ivy academe. There are many academic novels, generally comic rather than tragic and highly satiric rather than naturalistic: think Lucky Jim and various works by David Lodge, Zadie Smith, Francine Prose, to name a few off the top. Also a few Providence novels at or near the 80s - Geoffrey Wolfe's eponymous novel most notable. Before I even think about evaluating The Marriage Plot, I have to note another reason why I picked it up : it's the perfect antidote to several weeks of late Henry James. The Marriage Plot is the anti-Ambassadors: a plethora of characters, event-driven, lots of back story, scenes pushed forward through dialogue, dialogue quick and quippy rather then intricate and obscure, open and direct about sex and about human relationships, youthful and American, broadly sarcastic rather than maddeningly subtle. I don't know if it's "better" than The Ambassadors, and it's definitely not as literary or structurally ambitious - but so far (50 pages) it's far more accessible and a lot more fun.