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Farrar, Straus and Giroux
October 2011
On Sale: October 11, 2011
416 pages
ISBN: 0374203059
EAN: 9780374203054
Hardcover
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Fiction Family Life
It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and
life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on
College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and
listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful
English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen
and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies
at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to
read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the
suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in,
in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about
deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real
life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes.
Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and
lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar,
and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic
and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time,
her old “friend” Mitchell Grammaticus—who’s been reading
Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces,
obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his
mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this
amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter
the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything
they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a
biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret
responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and
plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to
get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face
with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the
existence of God, and the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead?
Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to
the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and
divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding
of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides
revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating
a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the
intimate journal of our own lives.
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