The Nature of Things

People who have read  The Marriage Plot  seem to fall into two camps: They love it or they find it pretentious and hate it.  In fact, when you get right down to it, the act of writing a novel, any novel, could be seen as pretentious. What makes you, the writer, think you have anything of importance to say to me, the reader, anyway? How presumptuous of you! However, that's not my camp. I admire the courage and the tenacity which it takes to put oneself out there and write a novel. Even a bad novel deserves some respect for the effort it took to produce it. But  The Marriage Plot  is not a bad novel. In fact, it is a very good novel and I am in the "love it" camp.  In his much-praised novel, Eugenides imagines three college students from his  alma mater , Brown, in the early 1980s. They are: Madeleine, a passionate reader and English major, who is writing her senior thesis on the "marriage plot" which lies at the heart of so many great English novels suc...