Hey LitStackers! Here’s a Double LitStack Rec, of two wildly good reads, The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, and Thief River Falls by Brian Freeman. Enjoy this classic LitStack Rec and pick up a copy of both for your LitStack.
In This Double LitStack Rec of The Marriage Plot and Thief River Falls
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The Marriage Plot
by Jeffery Eugenides
“Heartbreak is funny to everyone but the heartbroken.” That ironic reflection comes early in Jeffrey Eugenides’ lively 2011 novel, The Marriage Plot. The observation is made by Madeleine Hanna, one of three central characters, all of whom are students at Brown University. We meet them on the morning of graduation in 1982: liberal arts undergrads about to enter the post-grad world.
Eugenides, himself a graduate of Brown, won the Pulitzer Prize for his second novel, Middlesex, is also the author of a debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, which was made into an eerie film, an ironic seventies set piece by Sofia Coppola, and a story collection, Fresh Complaints.
The title, The Marriage Plot, refers to the novelistic tradition in which a story ends in matrimony, a happy plot reversal after protracted obstacles of (typically) misunderstanding, separation, and interlopers. It’s a trope that’s ingrained in western literature—think Austen, Eliot, the Bronte sisters—and a plot device that, in the 20th century, migrated to film, defined by those proverbial kisses at the close of a film.
At the center of The Marriage Plot is the romantic triad of Madeleine, Mitchell Grammaticus, the wayward philosophy major, and Leonard Bankhead, brilliant but troubled biology brainiac. The two suitors are opposites of temperament and style. And Madeleine, with her love for Victoriana and nineteenth-century novels, is a foil to both. All three are romantics, but how and why they seek the intensity of romance makes for the novel’s addictive character-driven story.
“In Madeleine’s face was a stupidity Mitchell had never seen before. It was the stupidity of all normal people. It was the stupidity of the fortunate and the beautiful, of everybody who got what they wanted in life and so remained unremarkable.”
Eugenides’ prose dances along doing amazing things that seem contrary in the same line of prose: it provides entertaining, intelligent reading while revealing the deeper truths of its characters. Really, The Marriage Plot has it all. Plot, character, insight, books, love, loss, eighties music. And woven into it all is the motif of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, that classic of eighties academia (I dug out my copy and took a sentimental journey through the highlighted sections).
There is a richness to The Marriage Plot, not only in its meta-layering of books about books, but of the gentle conceit that love, though well portrayed in books, is difficult to capture with any real clarity in life.
—Lauren Alwan
About Jeffrey Eugenides
Jeffrey Eugenides — winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Middlesex — was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993, and has since been translated into fifteen languages and made into a major motion picture. His second novel, Middlesex, was an international bestseller. Jeffrey Eugenides is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Foundation for the Arts, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a Fellow of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American Academy in Berlin. Jeffrey Eugenides lives in Berlin.
Other Titles by Jeffrey Eugenides
Thief River Falls
by Brian Freeman
Full disclosure, I picked up Thief River Falls, a psychological thriller (not my genre of choice) because I live in Minnesota and a close family friend hails from Thief River Falls. When this friend talks of home, of the people he knows and his experiences he’s had, it reminds me of the small towns I grew up in. I know how excited I’d be if a book written by a successful author would have been set in one of those small towns of my childhood! So I gave it a chance.
At first, Thief River Falls seemed to have the inconsistencies and lack of characterizations that I fear in these kinds of popular novels, especially ones written by men where the main character is female. I noticed situations that were unstable, where I was thrown from reality into incredulity. (A blue Camaro with blue racing stripes left unused in a garage that houses a multitude of stray cats and yet is immaculate? A boy of ten who acts more like a child of five or six and vacillates from stoic and observant to giggling and prone to outbursts of affection towards a virtual stranger?) By the end of the novel, when events played out, it all made chilling sense, and rearranged my thinking.
Lisa Powers is a writer who hails from the small town of Thief River Falls, Minnesota. She has written a number of mystery novels, but becomes a literary celebrity when one of her books is optioned by a well known Hollywood player to become a major motion picture. The title of that book is, interestingly enough, Thief River Falls, set in her hometown. But Lisa has had a rough and tragic life. Not only did she lose her fiancé some years earlier, but her mother is killed in a brutal car accident. Her father, bereft, hangs himself in the family home. Two of her siblings drown in the river that passes through the town, and her twin brother flees Thief River Falls, leaving Lisa alone to deal with her grief and loss.
Then late one night she after returning to the remote farmhouse she has rebuilt as her retreat, in the middle of a blustering storm, a runaway boy with no memory shows up with a terrifying story: he’s witnessed a horrifying murder, which the police want to cover up. When Lisa attempts to collaborate the boy’s tale, she finds herself drawn into a harrowing mystery where every attempt she makes to find the truth is thwarted by not only the authorities but others that she once trusted. Someone in power wants the boy back, but Lisa is obsessed with saving the boy and unraveling the mystery, even while the trap set around them tightens.
Honestly, I was struck with the sense of place in Thief River Falls, the depictions of life in Northern Minnesota and the novel Thief River Falls itself. This sense of place kept me reading. It grounds the novel and holds it all together, giving it an element of reality that bolsters the dramatic conclusion.
All in all, I’m glad I read this book and recommend it highly. I might just try another Brian Freeman book in the future, just to see what else he can do. After all, I’ve heard that Thief River Falls isn’t the only novel he’s set in Minnesota. Who knows? He might make a convert of me yet.
— Sharon Browning
About Brian Freeman
Brian Freeman is a New York Times and Amazon Charts bestselling author of more than two dozen psychological thrillers, including the Jonathan Stride series and multiple popular stand-alone novels. His books have been sold in 46 countries and 23 languages. He is widely acclaimed for his “you are there” settings and his complex, engaging characters and twist-filled plots. Brian was also selected as the official author to continue Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne series.
Other Titles by Brian Freeman
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