When the book club selected The Marriage Plot, we were hoping to discuss something with a strong central female character. We were disappointed.
The book centers around three Brown students during the eighties, and follows them through their college and postgraduate years. The first, Madeleine Hanna, is a beautiful and privileged English major who has an unfashionable fascination with the classic marriage stories of British literature during a period when her peers are more interested in semiotics and literary theory. Her classmate Mitchell Grammaticus is a theology student with an obsessive crush on Madeline, and spends the book trying to reconcile his religious beliefs with his human failings. Finally, Leonard Bankhead, who dates, and eventually marries, Madeline, is an enigmatic, brilliant, and initially charismatic biologist with self-destructive and manic-depressive tendencies.
