The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
Boring.
Characters I can’t seem to like. No plot to speak of. A prose style that despite being plain doesn’t offer the pleasure of being perfunctory. Set in a places I don’t care about, in a time I don’t care about, a time of life that’s more or less meaningless to examine. Started off as a three-star novel, and I only kept reading it because my wife is reading it and we like to read the same things sometimes so we can talk about them. And she only picked it because she read—and said she liked—Middlesex.
Struggled to get through even a page at a time, and so it became a two-star novel. Was a steady two as I slogged through. And then page 313. Total unmitigated bullshit. Made me sick to my stomach. Became a one. I am getting really tired of this misogynistic crap. I’m no white knight, I’m no feminist, I’m not some kind of activist—I’m a middle-aged dude raised in the Midwest, so I’m sure I’m guilty of male privilege as anyone else. But I don’t need to see yet another book, written by a man, where a woman is most fulfilled when she’s gives herself, even for a few moments, to madness.
What was good about the book? Uh, I don’t know. The Franzian narrative style, the “tell don’t show” that’s nearly documentary. That let me get through pages quickly. The ending was good, because it meant I was done reading. Eugenides is more than capable of creating tension between characters, so there’s that.
But the pseudo-intellectual treatments of literature, criticism, religion, psychology? Bunk. Don’t waste your time with this terrible novel. And be wary of blurbists who say its good. What else do they say is good? Avoid those too.