The Marriage Plot

On graduation day at Brown in 1982, Madeleine Hanna is finishing her thesis on the marriage plot in 19th-century novels and waking up next to Leonard Bankhead, the brilliant biology student whose manic-depression she has just begun to understand. Mitchell Grammaticus, the religious-studies major who has loved Madeleine since freshman year, is leaving for a Eurail trip that will end in Mother Teresa's Calcutta. The book moves through the year after graduation, the marriage Madeleine and Leonard rush into, the breakdown that follows, and the slow recognition each of these three people comes to about who they actually are. Eugenides writes a campus-and-after novel that takes Austen, Derrida, and mental illness equally seriously.