English major Madeleine, poised but insecure, writes her thesis on the demise of the marriage plot. The fourteen months described here feel both irrevocably past-no computers or cell phones, lots of typed and handwritten letters-yet discouragingly familiar-Greeks are protesting, unemployment is high. The novel follows Madeleine, Mitchell, and Leonard from their 1982 graduation through the summer of 1983. What happens to the marriage plot under these circumstances? While the characters in The Marriage Plot take it for granted that one day they’ll marry, marriage is not the most likely outcome for twenty-two-year-olds who can exit marriage as easily, or uneasily, as they enter it. Marriage used to be the natural conclusion to any story, but it’s been over a century since novels could wrap up loose ends with a wedding. Most of all, as its clever title announces, The Marriage Plot is both a realist story about marriage and a postmodern, metafictional commentary on the kind of story it tells.

Like a campus novel, the syllabus novel exposes the personal foibles driving academic trends, but like a novel of ideas, the syllabus novel celebrates how books shape people’s lives.

Its protagonists are Brown University students, Class of 1982, which also makes The Marriage Plot a campus novel and a novel of ideas-let’s call this hybrid the syllabus novel. In The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides asks what would happen if nineteenth-century literature married twentieth-century theory, and the result is many brilliant novels in one: a romance, a coming-of-age story, a travelogue, an account of madness, and a tale of religious quest.

Jeffrey eugenides books