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‘The Marriage Plot’ by Jeffrey Eugenides

With a 1980s love triangle, Jeffrey Eugenides manages to retool the 19th-century romance for a post-modern age

By Amanda Katz

 |   

  October 14, 2011

It is 1982 at Brown University, and marriage and plot are both on the rocks. Undergraduates are abandoning weddings for hookups. On the literary front, they are tossing aside suburban realists like Updike and Cheever in favor of writers like the Marquis de Sade and Derrida. You can guess where this leaves the marriage plot. That stalwart 19th-century device no longer figures in serious fiction, at least according to voguish academics. “Where could you find the marriage plot nowadays? You couldn’t,’’ Jeffrey Eugenides writes in his new novel, “The Marriage Plot.’’

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