The Marriage Plot
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Eugenide’s eagerly awaited follow-up to The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex offers a love triangle among a group of Brown University students, and is itself a kind of pastiche of the 19th-century novels the English undergraduates have been analysing in class. Eugenides has said that the book is, very loosely, based upon his own collegiate experiences.
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Rooney, who has a masters degree in English literature, told The New Yorker in 2018 that her books are “basically 19th-century novels dressed up in contemporary clothing” – books that Connell spends much of his time reading as an English student at Trinity College, Dublin. (The eagle-eyed will notice Rooney uses a quote from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda as an epigraph.) The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides, Middlesex) also took inspiration from the English literary canon in his third book, a campus novel set Brown University in Rhode Island, in which the English major Madeleine Hanna havers between two suitors, while writing her thesis on Victorian romances. There’s more to it than that – Madeleine takes a detour into Derrida and Barthes; her hapless admirer Mitchell wrestles with theology; her mercurial boyfriend Leonard is diagnosed with bipolar disorder – but, in essence, this metafictional love triangle is a book about books that has much that will appeal those who like Normal People.
From our article Books like Normal People
