Quick review: The marriage plot

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides outlines the emotional career of a Brown graduand. The book employs loving, not to say laboured, evocations of 1980s sartorial and intellectual mores (Ray-Bans, Julia Kristeva), and revives the rather 80s structural device of intertextuality to ask whether its protagonist really enjoys greater freedom than the 19th-century novelistic heroines she has taken as her academic subject.

It is roguishly, and a little unrelentingly clever; yet it offers a full, and fully interiorised, account of a female character, something male authors often struggle or neglect to do.

•  'The Marriage Plot' is published by Fourth Estate, R200

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