Jeffrey Eugenides, Motown, and The Marriage Plot

October 23, 2011

Jeffrey Eugenides, Motown, and
The Marriage Plot

Pick up a Sunday edition of The Detroit Free Press today, and you'll see my profile of Pulitzer-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides and his thoughts on his native Detroit city, as well as my review of The Marriage Plot. Together, the package is the cover story of the Entertainment section, which means really big broadside photographs illustrate the articles -- I love it. (Both articles are also currently available online, though it's been my experience that they don't live forever there.)

Candid aside: this was a joyful assignment. Eugenides was interesting and engaging to talk with, and I could've gone on and on reading this immersive and wonderful novel. It seems to me to be the best thing he's done. My review for the Free Press got clipped for space, alas. Here is an excerpt of the review, including the original last paragraph in full:

In The Marriage Plot, we meet Madeline, Leonard, and Mitchell on the brink of their graduation from Brown University in 1982. A deceptively simple narrative voice keeps pace through a story that unfolds through three vantage points in cities around the world: an Arts and Crafts home in Portland, a Paris apartment, an American Express office in Athens, Mother Teresa’s hospice in Calcutta, a science lab on Cape Cod, a Manhattan subway, and a Greektown restaurant in Detroit patronized by former mayor Coleman Young and mobsters who enjoy tormenting waiters.

{...}

There’s a coaxing ease to the prose, which carries a doubleness of intellectual rigor and sheer storytelling verve. The novel’s humor disarms the reader, opening us to the novel’s serious accounting of the troubled human search for love and truth. To read The Marriage Plot is to simmer in that hot space between mind and heart. The novel’s center is at once conventional and radical: it interrogates our hunger to live a meaningful life of body, mind, spirit, and heart. It is a novel of desires.

Posted at 10:53 AM in Book Reviews, Culture, Detroit Stories, Isak, Literary Life | Permalink

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Comments

BRAVO!!!!!!!!

Posted by: Nina Misuraca Ignaczak | October 23, 2011 at 11:16 AM

Wow! I love that complete last paragraph, Anna. I just finished the book last night, and enjoyed it immensely.

By the way - I have unending covetousness of your blog... (What a weird word!)

Posted by: Cynthia McAfee | November 25, 2011 at 05:15 PM

It's such a beautiful book, isn't it? I found myself loving it more as it went on.

And for the record: I am a big fan of weird words!

Posted by: Anna Clark | November 26, 2011 at 05:08 PM

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