Saying I Do – Rover Arts Interview with Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Marriage Plot

By Martyn Bryant

Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, opens his latest novel The Marriage Plot with an epigraph by François de La Rochefoucauld: “People would never fall in love if they hadn’t heard love talked about.”

The Marriage Plot interweaves the story of three characters, the bookish and beautiful Madeleine, the restless Leonard, and the Renaissance man Mitchell. As they navigate through their final semesters at Brown University (Providence, Rhode Island) and the year that follows, they step out of the somewhat comfortable confines of academia into the wider world. Eugenides, who is far less cynical than Rochefoucauld, spins the story from a seed, itself included early on in the book, “Madeleine’s love troubles had begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love.”

Eugenides uses the academic environment to fill the novel with literature, semiotics, philosophy and biology. The characters study intellectual matters whilst confronting them bodily, making efforts to not submit to their animal selves. The Marriage Plot focusses on this fundamental tension, grounding the story and allowing Eugenides to create an ambitious and profoundly reaching novel.

Eugenides pulls on a bounty of euphonious English words throughout and has an ability to “whiplash” – as he puts it – mundane and superfluous observations: “Sanitation workers were sweeping the parks and sweeping the curbs, their uniforms impossibly clean,” “They had lunch in a restaurant near Whaler’s Wharf, with fishing nets hung on the walls. A sign in the window informed customers that the establishment would be closing in another week.”

One of Eugendies’ most warming qualities is his tremendous wit, reflected in pithy phrases, “Madeleine’s need for a shower was almost medical,” “Leonard’s exhaustion had to do with the inherent demands of the day, with getting up, getting dressed, making it to campus.” As he began in The Virgin Suicides, he continues his honest articulations of obsession, desire and sex, sometimes with hilarity. “All the while she’d been accusing Mitchell of objectifying women, he’d been secretly objectifying her. She had an incredible ass!” Or, “That was the odd thing about Leonard’s disease, the almost pleasurable way it began.”

The Marriage Plot is exquisitely focused and crafted. It’s interrogative, nerdy, funny, sensual, tragic and uplifting. Above all, it’s a great piece of drama, ambitious and comprehensive, which creates a space to dream.

I recently spoke with Jeffrey Eugenides about the novel, some of the questions it raises and how it sits relative to his other works.

What is The Marriage Plot about?

It’s about three young people getting out of college and entering the real world in 1982. Madeleine is an English Major, very besotted with the 19^th century novel and struggling with her own environment of romantic ideals and various expectations about falling in love. Whereas Mitchell has always been in love with Madeleine, without any success, and Madeleine has a boyfriend Leonard who is a brilliant charismatic guy but who has also a certain secret, a mental instability. I think it’s three young people who are having their first real potent love affairs and trying to figure out what’s the proper way to be in them.

Does it reflect your own undergraduate experience at Brown University or with yourself in general?

I was remembering the time as best I could, the books we were reading, the debates we were having in terms of semiotics – because semiotics was just coming to the States at that point and everyone was fiercely debating whether it was the new creed, the new wisdom, or whether it was a crock.

I came across the Latin Phrase libido sciendi, or lust of knowing, which you seem to have as you navigate through many different areas of discourse, critical reflection and lived experience. Where does this lustful curiosity, if you agree with it, stem from and how do you manage it and focus it into the novel

Well, when I write a novel I usually begin with one idea. But that idea suggests another, which suggests another and so before long I have a kind of network of different interests and that requires me to sometimes learn about things in order to write about fiction. This began, really, with the idea – this whole book began with one sentence: Madeleine’s love troubles have begun at a time when the French theory she was reading deconstructed the very notion of love. The idea of a young woman emancipating herself from her romantic idealism by reading semiotic theory as she’s trying to get a grip on this concept of love, on being tyrannised by it, and at the same time as she’s doing that she falls in love with others in the classroom, so her heart and her head are at odds. But then I started really thinking about Leonard and his mental illness and after that I introduced the character of Mitchell who has an interest in mysticism. So already at that point with the three characters I’m starting to add on different areas of curiosity. Leonard is a biologist studying the mating of yeast. I had to learn a fair amount about how you go about genetic properties of yeast and I also had to remember a lot of the religious studies courses that I had taken to flesh out Mitchell’s personality and his thinking. So little by little if you write about people and really think about who they are and what they’d be interested in, you find yourself possessing or investigating many different zones of curiosity. And that’s how it happens.

You have a use of terse phrases that have an exuberant facility to imply a lot from a little. A couple I’ve picked out; “Madeleine paid no attention, quietly slicing and eating the first of fifty-seven grapefruits she subsisted on until New Year’s”, “She arrived back at college for her senior year, then, intent on being studious, career orientated and aggressively celibate.” I read somewhere that style, according to Martin Amis, “is not something grappled on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception.”  I wonder if these phrases reflect your perception or a lightness of touch you’re trying to emulate.

Amis said something else that I always liked. He said that style, his morality in a sense, that in choosing to phrase something in one way or another you’re making choices about how to see the world, how to feel about the world and it’s not a mere ornament. It’s a culmination of discarding many false and cheap ways to say something. So there’s a discrimination that Amis equates as the morality and I always liked that idea.

I know why I wrote the first sentence because I was having dinner with a woman called Dodie Kazanjian who works for Vogue. She told me that the best diet you could have is the grape fruit diet. She said, just eat grapefruits, you actual expend more energy digesting the grapefruit and eating it that there is in the grapefruit. So she told me that while I was writing about Madeleine and I put it in. But you’re asking me about the way I write my sentences, the idea of the sentences, I don’t know. Both of those sentences have a comic whiplash at the end of them that I’m aware of when I write. It’s pretty intrinsic in the way that I write or see the world so it becomes fairly natural to me.

There’s a very funny line – Madeleine’s remembering an ex-boyfriend running lines for a play and she says, “His best dramatic moments came when the strain on his face from remembering his lines resembled the emotion he was trying to simulate.” Where does humour lie in the human condition, is it integral to the remarkable human resilience or indeed your own resilience?

I don’t really like people that don’t have a sense of humour, and I don’t like books that don’t have a sense of humour. I think I’ve always been happiest around people that make me laugh. In a sense it is a valid response to the absurdity of life and if you can’t find what’s funny then I’m not sure how you can actually get through your lives. So many novelists I like have a good sense of humour, not all, there are some that are very serious and I can still like the book, but it just comes so naturally to my personality that it would be impossible to keep it out of my writing.

You write, “There are some books that reached through the noise of life to grab you by the collar and speak only of the truest things.” Which books have done this for you?

Well, Herzog by Saul Bellow, certainly. The Aspern Papers by Henry James. But in this case I was really writing about Tolstoy. I think I’d put him up above anyone else is his ability to reach to reach out and talk about the most important things in life, a search for meaning, a search for God, what is means to have a child, what it means for people to die. He’s able to write about all the real fundamental human experiences with incredible clarity. That’s who I had in mind with that sentence, both his religious writings and his novels.

At the moment there is a zeitgeist of atheism re-emerging, a kind-of materialist reductivist atheism, and perhaps there’s a space that’s decreasing where you can talk about certain experiences, and these are going to be heavily bagagged words, like transcendent, awe-inspiring, and numinous. Do you recognize a need for that space and is this book a reflection of the need to create and preserve that space.

The re-emergent atheism is kind of surprising to me because it seems, at least in the intellectual or literary world, we’ve been in the zone of atheism for about a hundred years or more. I know there continues to be a huge segment, at least of the North American population, that is religious and maybe they disagree, but in the world I existed, or brought up in, there was not much talk about God or religion. And so, Dawkins and Hitchens are making arguments that have been settled in most peoples’ minds. Not entirely in my own, however, and it seems to me that there is a place to re-introduce the numinous or the transcendent and wonder about it. No matter what you’ve decided about the existence of God or not, we don’t know why we exist or why we are here. Especially when you’re young you have these moments where you feel it almost physically in your body, this strangeness of being alive. Why is the world the way it is? Is it an illusion? Is it real? Materialist arguments have never satisfied me to explain – well why do they come about? It seems impossible to write about people without having these questions be in their minds, because I think those questions are still in our minds. No one has settled it beyond reasonable doubt. To write about someone’s search for God doesn’t mean that I’m saying there definitely is a God and I know his address, but I do know that people do still go through these experiences trying to figure out how to live and that’s what I was trying to describe with Mitchell.

Of course the journalist Christopher Hitchens was very provocative when he touched on the subject that you touch in your book, about Mother Teresa. He called her “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.” Do you share his anger?

I’m friends with Christopher Hitchens and I think he’s great, and when I was writing this I was of course thinking about him and how he would dislike that part of the book. You know, there’s the character of Herb in this book who speaks some of the charges that Hitchens makes. But I wasn’t writing the book about Mother Teresa or trying to settle any argument about her. I was writing about someone who uses her, who takes the opportunity to test his level of altruism, by volunteering at their home. So it was beside the point what I really felt about her. I wouldn’t agree with Hitchens – I would agree that she was a fanatic but I’d agree that almost every saint is a fanatic.

In The Virgin Suicides you write from the young boys’ perspective, and in The Marriage Plot you go into three major characters’ perspectives. Some reviews labelled The Virgin Suicides as misogynistic; perhaps there is an unfair bias when a man is writing from a man’s perspective, or from a woman’s.

Well, The Virgin Suicides is written from the point of view of middle aged men remembering their adolescence. So they are kind of men who could never grow up and I think if you try to be truthful and honest and accurate about teenage boys and how they think about girls you quickly get to the viewpoint of it being called an obsessional or hyper-sexualised and if certain priggish people want to call it misogynistic they can. I don’t think that the boys’ interest in the girls is misogynistic. In Middlesex I wrote from the point of view of someone who’s intersex, who grew up and assumes a male identity. With The Marriage Plot, with Madeleine, it’s the first time that I’ve really written a book from the point-of-view of a woman. And I do so mainly without thinking of the person as a woman but just as a certain type of person who happens to be female and I think of her as an individual, imagining what she is like in all her particulars, what her family is like, what her interests are like, and I can put a lot of my own memories and my own history into her character. The places where I have to make sure I’m right about getting her female perspective down on the page I just have to imagine how certain things might be different for women in certain situations, whether it be socially, sexually, or the different problems women might have and the different things they would like that a man wouldn’t like. I usually get that from talking to women and asking them questions. Most of her character I’m able to do out of sheer empathy with the character.

I wondered if over the course 20 years, you felt the need to look at depression again or did it come naturally out as you started to write the novel.

This time I was intrigued by the idea. I knew that Madeleine had a boyfriend that had manic depression. I didn’t know who he was going to be or what it was going to be like but I was intrigued by that idea that she could have a boyfriend who was both the best and the worst of boyfriend possible. In his good states he’s charming, full of energy, wonderful to be around. In his bad states he’s childish and insufferable. Dramatically, I liked that idea, then when it came time to write about Leonard I found that I was extremely sympathetic to him and I didn’t know that this section of the book would be so long and so involved in writing about it, and by the end of feel as though I’d gone through some of those things myself. But that’s part of the discovery of writing a novel, sometimes characters you think might be minor turn out to be much, much larger as you get interested in them and that changes the entire structure of the book, the flavour of the book, and the centre even shifts. For me it was not a re-examination of mental illness, it’s the first time I tried to imagine it from the inside. In The Virgin Suicides the boys are outside those girls, you never go into the girls’ heads; you don’t know what’s going on. With Leonard you go in, the reader should experience his manic state in Cape Cod in the salt water taffy shop. You should really understand what it is like to be manic after reading this book. Whereas with reading The Virgin Suicides I don’t think you come out of it understanding what it’s like to be young and suicidal.

In Sofia Coppola’s film, The Virgin Suicides, by the sheer fact of there being whole actors, the Lisbon family was incarnated more than the book seemed to ever do. Is this an unavoidable feature of films, and would you let one of your novels be adapted into a film again?

Well, I just sold the rights for The Marriage Plot and I think out of all my books The Marriage Plot is the most suited for a film adaptation because it is a dramatized piece of work and I can see these people being enacted. With The Virgin Suicides, you’re absolutely right though, you never really see the girls, and you’re never sure how reliable the narrator is. Once they’re actresses and you can see them on the screen it gives a validity to the presentation of the book. But it was an inevitable consequence of film. It’s a very different medium, as soon as you take a book and make it into a film – it’s a different animal, it’s just not the same.

Last question. What are you writing now or next?

I have a book of short stories. I have about five or six of them done and I’ll write a couple more. I’ll have a book published in June.

Eugenides, Jeffrey, The Marriage Plot, published by Knopf Canada, 416 pages, 2011

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