Wednesday, January 18, 2012

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

I strongly suspected from the very beginning that the ending was going to be unsatisfying. If I had checked it out of the library or borrowed it instead of buying it for my Kindle, I would not have finished it. We trail around behind two fundamentally likeable characters while they make stupid decisions and throw away any number of opportunities to be happy. And that's how it ends: they have one last perfect chance to come together and they choose to part company and follow amorphous futures which have little expectation of much of anything. Essentially, I had the feeling that the writer was setting up the reader. He led us on down two narrative lines - and on and on and on - knowing all the while that he had no intention whatsoever of pulling it together at the end.

It seemed primarily to be a pseudo-literary vehicle for an awful lot of sex. Nobody loved anybody - not even themselves. There is an extensive and painful exploration of bipolar disorder, possibly the most interesting part of the story.

Sorry I bothered, but at least I can self-righteously tell other members of the book club that I did read it. I may bail on this group. The books that we have read that I liked were ones that I suggested - and no one else liked them much. And I have not liked many of their suggestions either.

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