The Marriage Plot

Here's a book with enjoyable flow, info you might be able to use and perfect insight into post-grad life in the 1980's.

Jeffrey Eugenides, author of Middlesex has written a book that's a pleasure to read, even though it's filled with brainy Brown graduates. Madeleine, the main character, meets her future husband in a semiotics class her senior year. She takes the class because as an English major who's never really felt mentally stretched, she feels she needs to read things others think of as deep. An old flame, Mitchell, is also in the class.

It turns out her new boyfriend, Leonard, is manic-depressive. She skips graduation to see him at the hospital where he's been admitted after stopping his medicine and sinking into himself. Eugenides paints a fascinating portrait of this chronic disease, which is treatable but not curable. He also shows how mental illness is still a stigma whereas other diseases, such as diabetes, are not.

You'll read everything you always wanted to know about yeast, traveling around India with little money, gambling in Monaco, and New Jersey's upper-middle class. Umberto Eco, Mother Teresa, and Quakerism are explored. Madeleine marries the mentally ill man whom she's been supporting emotionally and financially for over a year. The marriage lasts two months before it unravels like an old sweater.

The Marriage Plot is perfect if like me you love Victorian Literature (go Daniel Deronda!), are intrigued by mental illness (psych major!) and get a kick out of social satire. The fault, dear Brutus, is in ourselves.