Does Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot itself have a marriage plot?

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The question the reader asks himself during the whole of this book: will this novel itself follow the marriage plot? It seems to. For most of the 416 pages (or 695 pages if you read the large print edition as I did) the story, which takes place in the early 80s in Providence and on Cape Cod, is about a girl and her two suitors, one of whom she is smitten with and the other who has a more adversarial relationship with her.

Jane Austen has trained us to see this situation in terms of Elizabeth, Wickham, and Darcy and our expectations are raised as our heroine, Madeline, becomes increasingly disillusioned with the erratic Leonard. Meanwhile Mitchell, the man whom she has always dismissed, is off on a bildungsroman trip around the world, ending in India where he volunteers at Mother Teresa's clinics as he examines his religious commitment.

The three major characters meet at Brown University where Madeline is an English major who doesn't buy into deconstructionism and all the other isms that were so popular in the 80s (and now are so dated.) She loves the old ways of approaching the novel and she loves the English Victorian novel especially, with its reliance on the marriage plot and the happy ending. Will she get her own happy ending?

2012 No 4