Looking for Love, by the Book (Published 2011) (2024)

No one’s more adept at channeling teenage angst than Jeffrey Eugenides. Not even J. D. Salinger.

His operatic debut, “The Virgin Suicides,” depicted the deaths of five pretty sisters and the fallout on the boys who worshipped them. His Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel, “Middlesex,” chronicled the bumpy coming of age of a narrator who happens to be a hermaphrodite. And his new novel, “The Marriage Plot,” charts the emotional peregrinations of three slightly older characters, as they navigate their way through college and the uncertainties of the real world after graduating in 1982.

This novel’s bright, spirited heroine, Madeleine, is an English major at Brown University who, in the heyday of semiotics and deconstruction, is writing her honors thesis on “the marriage plot” — that is, the traditional mating dance, as performed in the novels of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Henry James. Mr. Eugenides’s own moving but long-winded book turns out to be a sort of modern-day variation on those old-fashioned narratives, meant, it would seem, to demonstrate that sexual equality and divorce haven’t killed the novel, as one of Madeleine’s pompous professors contends.

“The Marriage Plot” revolves around a love triangle that develops among Madeleine and two men — the charismatic Leonard and the adoring Mitchell — and it turns out to be a lot less dramatic and a lot less daring than the author’s earlier novels. Unlike the manic-depressive Leonard, who veers between high-wire ups and brooding downs, this novel very much occupies the safe middle ground; there is nothing very bravura about it, though Mr. Eugenides’s ability to make us care about Madeleine’s romantic travails and at least one of her suitors results in a story that steadily gains in emotional intensity and amplitude as it rumbles along.

As depicted by Mr. Eugenides the ’80s were not so different from today: a recession greeted newly minted college graduates, jobs were hard to come by, and moving back home to live with parents was a popular fallback option. There were differences too, of course: Prince and Annie Lennox played on the soundtrack of students’ lives; people sent letters (written on typewriters, no less) not e-mails; and deconstruction was the trendy doctrine ascendant in university English departments.

Early portions of the novel that trace Madeleine’s perplexed reactions to the chilly, relativistic and self-congratulatory ethos of semiotics and radical feminism can be as funny as David Lodge’s famous sendups of academia, but Mr. Eugenides has a way of belaboring his points, and the reader soon begins to feel as claustrophobic as Madeleine is suffering through classes about Derrida and Barthes and Baudrillard. When the author turns from campus politics to the romantic geometry of the Madeleine-Leonard-Mitchell triangle, the narrative gears really engage.

Madeleine, we learn, is a pretty, privileged preppie, good at tennis and accustomed to plenty of male attention. She has a whole set of rules about what sort of men she will date: no nervous guys, no guys who have problems with their own parents, no guys who don’t ask her out first.

Leonard, needless to say, breaks all these rules, and Madeleine soon realizes she’s deeply, madly in love — or at least very smitten: “It was as if, before she’d met him, her blood had circulated grayly around her body, and now it was all oxygenated and red.” For someone so used to being in control, it’s a thrilling, disorienting and frightening experience, heightened further when Madeleine realizes that Leonard’s depression is not a passing mood but a serious and chronic condition that could well sabotage their relationship.

Although Mr. Eugenides manages to make Madeleine’s feelings about Leonard thoroughly palpable, he has a harder time turning Leonard into a full-fledged human being. He endows the character with some attributes that remind the reader of David Foster Wallace — besides being brilliant and given to depression, we’re told that Leonard loves philosophy, chews tobacco, wears a bandanna on his head, and runs to stay in shape — but never welds these elements together convincingly with Leonard’s aspirations as a scientist and his day-to-day life.

As for Leonard’s descent into a crippling depression, it is described with a plentitude of physical and psychological detail but lacks the visceral kick of, say, Wallace’s own surreal, caffeinated descriptions in “Infinite Jest” of drug addiction, panic attacks and the horrors of detox.

Mitchell, the third leg of the romantic triangle, shares certain biographical similarities with his creator — growing up in a Greek-American family in the Detroit area and attending Brown — and is drawn with considerably more verisimilitude. Like the protagonist in the classic Eddy Arnold song “You Don’t Know Me” (“Though my heart aches with the love for you/Afraid and shy I let my chance go by”), he’s been smitten with Madeleine for years, but having failed to make a move when he had a chance, has since been cast in the role of friend and confidante, even though Madeleine knows he is “the kind of smart, sane, parent-pleasing boy” she should marry.

Madeleine still occasionally flirts with Mitchell, and Mitchell seethes with secret rage at his rival Leonard. After graduation Mitchell decides to go to India on a kind of spiritual pilgrimage and joins the volunteers working with Mother Teresa — much as Mr. Eugenides did in 1982 — only to find that bathing and caring for the sick makes him squeamish.

Returning to America, Mitchell is filled with self-loathing: “His dreaminess, his swooning — his intelligent stupidity — were responsible for everything that was idiotic about him, for his fantasy of marrying Madeleine and for the self-renunciations that hedged against the fantasy’s not coming true.”

It’s in mapping Mitchell’s search for some sort of belief that might fill the spiritual hole in his heart and Madeleine’s search for a way to turn her passion for literature into a vocation that this novel is at its most affecting, reminding us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love and in love with books and ideas.