Love triangle amid great love stories

By Jeffrey Eugenides

Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

416 pp. $28

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Reviewed by Glenn C. Altschuler

On a warm spring day at Brown University in the early 1980s, after Leonard Bankhead and Madeleine Hanna had "picnicked on each other," Maddy whispers "I love you," in a voice edged with "a sense of peril." Leonard reaches for his copy of

A Lover's Discourse

, by Roland Barthes, finds the page with the words "Je t'aime," and hands it to her. Overcome at first with happiness, Madeleine reads on: "Once the first avowal has been made, 'I love you' has no meaning whatever." When she notices that Leonard is smirking, Madeleine throws the book at his head. In the ensuing months, as Leonard's moods swing, she will wonder whether her friend, Mitchell Grammaticus, a brilliant religious-studies student who adores her, might be better suited to be her mate.

Throughout The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex, who graduated from Brown in 1983, plays this triangle with great skill, in an examination, by turns tough and tender, of the nature of "true love" - and whether it ever works out, except in novels. Along the way, he throws lots of books at our heads, with a smart and tart survey of the great love stories of the 19th century, religious literature, postmodern fiction, semiotics, and deconstruction.

Eugenides is especially adept at capturing the struggles, the good sense, and the nonsense of emerging adults in contemporary America. A young woman lambastes a male companion, who interrupts their conversation to stare at a pretty passerby, as a "pivot-head." A young man, who watches a couple "crossing the campus in the purple twilight," each with a hand in the back pocket of the other's jeans, ruminates about the "stupidity of the fortunate and beautiful," who get what they want in life and therefore "remain unremarkable." And, Eugenides observes, not a day goes by without a group of twenty-something students "having a heavy" (discussion).

Albeit in different ways, the characters in The Marriage Plot search for "the ultimate reality" while contending with the mundane challenges of their everyday existence. On occasion, their search, and I suspect, the interest of readers in it, bogs down, as Eugenides supplies details, many of them familiar, about the manifestations of manic depression and the experiences of college graduates, who think they might find themselves - and leave behind their generation's obsession with cool clothes, vacation villas, and awesome orgasms - by spending a year visiting the cathedrals of Europe and/or ministering to the sickest of the sick in Mother Teresa's India.

Nonetheless, the members of Eugenides' ménage remain compelling, and touchingly "real." In Switzerland, Mitchell uses his credit card to give his parents a jolt, imagining their response to monthly statements showing purchases of a meal at a Zurich restaurant called Das Bordell; a copy of Charles Colson's post-Watergate memoir Born Again; and a subscription to a communist magazine, to be delivered to the Grammaticus home in Detroit. Leonard, the biologist, tells Madeleine that in an environment with a lack of nutrients, diploid yeast cells break into haploids, because it is easier to survive when you're single. And Maddy, who analyzed the novels of Jane Austen and George Eliot in her undergraduate thesis, considers a late-20th-century twist for the marriage plot.

Eugenides is enough of a modernist to end his novel without a "happily ever after." His characters are a long way from working out their problems or answering ultimate questions. But he has provided them, and us, with survival kits for an existential world, insights about life and love, and, let's hope, an enduring appreciation for works of fiction, those "hard-won, transcendent things."