Holiday Review - The Marriage Plot

Preamble first. This review is of a proof edition of The Marriage Plot (and many thanks to the kind colleague who managed to bag me a copy of it), and so anything I write about here may not resemble what makes it into the finished work, may be totally off base, etc, etc. Don't sue me.

With that said, on to the review.

What I am about to say makes me very sad. Believe me, no one wanted Jeffrey Eugenides' new book to succeed more than I did. Middlesex was a big delicious chocolate cake of a novel and The Virgin Suicides was a perfectly creepy little masterclass in how to create an atmosphere. My assumption was, therefore, that his third book would be as awesome as the first two. I certainly thought so. Man was I excited about reading this book. But - oh readers, I am filled with sorrow - this book was not very good.

Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides both had such clear, clever ideas behind them, but it's a bit difficult to understand why Jeffrey Eugenides thought he needed to write The Marriage Plot. The story of three college graduates, who consider critical opinions about love while falling unsuitably in love with each other, it is very much lacking in a central point.

Jeffrey Eugenides seems to have based the entire book in reaction to a school of thought (mentioned early on in the text) that says that the marriage plot as a novel genre (think Jane Austen and Mr Darcy's acres) died with the introduction of divorce and women's rights - marriage stopped mattering in the way it used to, That's all very well, except it's also completely and utterly not true. Recent lyrical masterpiece Single Ladies is essentially a paean to great big white dresses; the entire world went absolutely potty when Prince William decided to get hitched; and I don't know what Twilight is if it isn't a marriage plot. You could argue that Twilight isn't high literature, and of course it isn't, but I don't think when visitors came to Jane Austen's door she ever responded with "I'LL BE OUT IN A MINUTE, I'M JUST WRITING SOME HIGH LITERATURE!" What I'm trying to say is, there's no point being arrogant and thinking that just because no really good people are doing something, it isn't being done. Of course it bloody is. Three people, all in love, wanting to get married to each other? You might as well write a book where the Pope is Catholic and bears shit in the woods.

Jeffrey Eugenides is also reacting to novels where there are no solid, real-world characters, only people drifting in and out of a room mournfully talking about Sartre. Fair enough. Except the problem with this is that his solid characters aren't people that I'd willingly spend any time with at all. Madeleine, the heroine, is a attractive young WASP with a debilitating personality disorder: half the time she is a vapid sexpot, and the other half she is a serious-minded English student specialising in Victorian literature. To let us know when she is about to do something serious-minded, Jeffrey Eugenides has her put on a pair of nonsensically beat-up nerd glasses (we are told about a thousand times that her family is obnoxiously rich, so why can she not afford new ones? I suspect it is meant to be endearing. It is not endearing). Madeleine's 'unsuitable' love interest, Leonard, actually does have a debilitating personality disorder, depression, and I find it more than mildly disturbing that this is put forward as pretty much the only reason why he is so unsuitable. He's an asshole, sure, but that seems to be presented as just another of his symptoms (I think the people I know with depression would be rather offended at this). The other suitor, Mitchell, is unoffensive but also not particularly interesting or much involved in the plot. He spends most of the novel in India, reading scholarly works about religion. These are quoted in large, painful chunks throughout the novel. Because in case you hadn't noticed, this is HIGH LITERATURE.

That's another of The Marriage Plot's major flaws. Whereas most novels with pretensions to Great Thoughts are happy enough to namecheck a critic or thinker, and then get on with it, The Marriage Plot rams each mentioned critic down your throat. READ THIS! CONNECT WITH IT! HAVE YOU CONNECTED WITH IT YET? IF NOT, YOU ARE PROBABLY STUPID. I began to feel frightened and confused, as though in not recognising and comprehending Derrida's theory of love I had failed as an English student and also as a person. What if (I thought) I go into my first MA seminar next month and I don't understand any of that either? What if I am stupid? What if everyone else realises that I am only pretending to be an English scholar? WHAT THEN?

And if that's the way I felt, as a person who has quite recently completed an English BA and thus exactly the target audience of most of The Marriage Plot's frame of reference, then I can't imagine who else might be able to truly get this book in the way it wants to be understood. Who is it for? Who does Jeffrey Eugenides imagine will read it? This is one of the most unashamedly elitist novels I've come across in quite a while, and there's not even a reason for it. It's about getting married, for heavens' sake. It ought to at least be engaging.

The front cover of my proof copy tells me sternly that it is NOT FOR RESALE OR QUOTATION, and since I am bad at arguing, and especially bad at arguing with lawyers, I am going to obey the big black text. This is a pity, though, because I would very much like to share some of The Marriage Plot's choicer quotes with you all. At one bewildering point, around page 350, it takes a sharp right turn, abandons narrative completely and goes barrelling down Bad Porn Lane (this is adjascent to Awful Literary Sex Avenue, which is where most of The Blue Book takes place). It is all very horrible and intricately described.

This was the moment that I finally gave up trying to love The Marriage Plot. I had been trying so much, really giving it the benefit of the doubt, following it faithfully as it wallowed along like our oversize American rental car trying to turn a corner, but then page 350 happened and I hit the wall. Things did not get any better after that. The ending was not only randomly and stupidly postmodern but completely inefficient: it left about thirty loose ends waving in the breeze, entirely ignored. Poor things. They had to be in this silly novel and then they didn't even get to be resolved.

And poor Jeffrey Eugenides, too. I feel so bad for hating this. I love his books! I'm sure he is a very nice person! And yet. This book is a failure. With all the will in the world, I can only give it

2 stars.

Classic review - Villette

For the last few weeks I have been interning Monday to Friday at a publisher's, and then working Saturdays at the book shop. Which has been totally fine, and perfectly easy to cope with, except that from time to time I find myself forgetting things, like how to spell hat, or where my email is, or what someone said to me five minutes before.

I have also been reading Villette by Charlotte Bronte. I'd been putting off reading this book for approximately ten years, in case it turned out to be awful and forced me to hate Charlotte Bronte, but I finally decided last week to stop being such a wuss and get on with it. So now I can finally claim to be a person who really does love Charlotte Bronte, since I have read not one but a whole two of her books.

The first thing to say is that it turns out that Villette is not an ideal book for dipping in and out of at random intervals while you wait for your next bus. I got into grown-up books via a lot of blockbuster 19th century novels, so they were all I knew to begin with, and for a long time I couldn't understand why people complained that they were difficult to read. Now I realise, though, that the complainers may have had something. Being able to read books from different time periods is a bit like tuning your ear to a foreign language - it's all about expectation and what you're used to. Villette was the first Victorian book I read after months of almost exclusively late-20th Century stuff, and it took me about eighty pages before its word choice stopped being nearly incomprehensible. Irids? Gloaming? Massy? These must all be nonsense words inserted to make me feel stupid! Complainers, I'm sorry. I finally understand what you mean.

I'd forgotten how much Bronte can write like she's just vomited up a Bible - and also how obscenely annoying it is when the notes at the back just give you chapter and verse of what she's referring to, rather than explaining the reference itself. As though I'm going to see 'Job 3:19' and be instantly enlightened - Job 3:19! My favourite part of Job! What a totally apt reference, Charlotte! I'm fairly sure it's all a ploy by the editor to show you that there are some things that you don't know that he totally does. Things like this are why I suspect most scholarly editors of being assholes.

But anyway, to the book itself. I discovered when I actually read Villette as opposed to thinking about reading it that a lot of things I'd been assuming about it weren't right at all. Most importantly, its title does not, in fact, refer to a person in any way, shape or form. It’s a town. Of course it bloody is. Villette, after all, means little town in French, and it turns out that Villette is all about (French-speaking) Belgium. Charlotte Bronte spent a lot of time being a schoolmistress in Belgium (and falling hopelessly in love with a married schoolmaster there), and she has a very low and rude opinion of the country as a result. Nothing like a bit of healthy xenophobia to increase a book's fun.

Villette turns out to be, in essence, Jane Eyre Goes To Belgium. If you've read Charlotte Bronte's greatest hit you will feel a strong sense of deja vu during Villette, since both novels are pretty much just the marriage plot, gone Gothic, and both can be summed up pretty much as follows:

Chilly, cerebral and faintly unattractive female with a fondness for grey dresses (*resemblance to C. Bronte entirely accidental) lacks fortune; goes in search of it; takes up teaching position; suffers Gothic hardships; meets short dark unhandsome man; undergoes extreme verbal abuse at his hands; is unaccountably aroused by said abuse; overcomes difficulties to win him; reader, she married him.

It really is Jane Eyre, only not quite so satisfying, mainly because M. Paul, the Mr. Rochester substitute, is such a very unpleasant little man. Mr Rochester may be mean, but he is never less than dishy, whereas M. Paul, for the first three-quarters of the novel at least, is mean without any mitigating circumstances at all. His favourite pastime is cornering Lucy and being rude to her, but he does also take pleasure in grabbing her and dragging her about a bit when he wants to make her feel especially cherished.  

Villette does confirm for me the really disturbing emotional issues the Brontes had about men: most of the conversations that Lucy and M. Paul have are just screeds of verbal abuse, which is viewed in the book somewhat along the lines of sexy talk. Paul spends all his time telling Lucy to stop being so clever and independent and also not to dress like such a slut, please, and she loves it. This is the sort of thing that makes me so sure that Charlotte and co. would have been super in love with the whole concept of Twilight. They wouldn't just have read the books, they'd have queued up for the midnight showings of all the films, wearing t-shirts that said TEAM EDWARD and crying. But despite all that, I did - extremely grudgingly - fall for Lucy and M. Paul's relationship by the end of the novel. It's so nice to have a romance between two book characters that isn't solely based on a mutual recognition of hotness and/or the man's possession of many acres of rolling landscape. That doesn't say much for my feminist credentials, I guess, but I don't think there's anything wrong with a bit of pragmatism from time to time.

Another thing that Villette confirmed for me is that Charlotte Bronte really was someone who, shall we say, had an extremely full mental landscape. There's an awful lot of heavy-handed emotional metaphor about angels of death and heavenly clouds and dark waters of the soul, all described in ways that left me somewhat concerned about how far their author believed in them as actual physical things that you might go out and see, like a tree or the shop on the corner. I can fully believe that Charlotte Bronte might come in from an afternoon's ramble on the moors and say, "I had a lovely walk. I saw two rabbits and the gorse was in bloom and then I turned a corner and there was the Angel of the Lord, standing at the top of a hill in his empyrean robes and flashing his massy eyes upon my face."

It does at least mean, though, that when Charlotte Bronte gets going she's great at description. My favourite scene in the novel - and possibly my favourite scene in anything I've read for quite a while - happens towards the end of the story. Someone slips Lucy some opium to make her sleep, it fails, she trips balls, goes outside and ends up at a carnival in the middle of the night. The whole thing reads like a Victorian Gatsby's Party, all flashing colours and manic laughter and faceless revellers menacing Lucy from all sides. Apparently, Charlotte prepared for this scene, not by taking drugs or going to an actual party, but by sitting in a chair and thinking very hard about what it would be like to be on opium. I do feel like Charlotte may not have been the easiest woman to get on with, in person, but stories like this make me seriously appreciative of her style.

I read Jane Eyre for the first time when I was twelve, just after I went through all the Jane Austen novels. I thought they were fine, but lacking in a certain something, plot-wise, and so Jane Eyre was pretty much a revelation unto my soul. Before Jane Eyre I thought that all books for adults were going to be like Jane Austen - full of people being polite and having nuanced emotions - but here was someone writing about INSANE VAMPIRE WOMEN IN ATTICS ON FIRE, and I decided then and there that growing up was going to be all right after all. Villette may not be quite as much of a shameless Goth-fest as Jane Eyre is, but it's still reassuringly full of random Gothic touches, all of which are pretty obviously jammed into the narrative for no better reason than Charlotte Bronte thought it would be cool. I like a woman who can sit down at her desk, realise that the scene in front of her is boring, and decide that what it needs right now is MORE GHOST NUNS. That's actually how the nun appears in the story, by the way - as THE NUN. She's so awesome that she needs capital letters.

So, as perhaps you may have guessed, I liked this book. Maybe I didn't love it with the mad religious fervour with which I love Jane Eyre - but then again, were I to review Jane Eyre here I would have to give it about a million embarrassingly emotional book-of-my-life stars, so nothing's ever going to quite compare. This, though, gets a friendly

4 stars.

A Book By Its Cover

Today a family of Chinese tourists came into the store and insisted on having a picture taken with myself and my co-worker, as though we were tame animals or interesting pieces of architecture. It is disturbing to think that, because of this, we have been inserted into their precious holiday memories for ever more; in fifty years' time, when they are leafing through their photo albums, they will come upon the horrible grinning picture of the two of us, look at each other and say, "Who the hell were those bitches?"

My only consolation is that I was wearing my new Great Gatsby t-shirt (eyes right, if you please, for the full effect), so at least the middle section of me was looking presentable. Book cover t-shirts are our newest non-book selling venture, and I think the ones we've got in are quite brilliant (here's the supplier's website if you want to have a look). I was hoping we'd get the Hound of the Baskervilles one in, since it has a satisfyingly floppy and hound-like dog on it, but in its absence I went for Gatsby. True, Daisy's eyes do stare blankly out at the world from the lower part of my bosom, and when I put it on I am probably aligning myself with roughly a million unique hipsters, but it's such a wonderful cover that I truly don't care. It's a picture of the

girl whose disembodied face floated along the dark cornices and blinding signs,

 - which is the book's in-joke reference to its cover, rather than the other way around: apparently Fitzgerald saw the cover art before the book was finished and liked it so much that he wrote the image into one of his descriptions of New York. Fitzgerald, by the way, was a proto-hipster himself - he coined the phrase 'jazz age' to describe the 20s and seems to have spent most of the decade mad drunk, using long words and talking about the meaning of life. A hipster if ever I heard of one.)

And that, in a very roundabout way, brings me to what I had meant this post to be about in the first place, which is book covers, and how much they affect the way people read. Of course, there are people who claim that covers, like clothes, do not matter - it is what's on the inside that counts. These people are sweet, and well-intentioned, and they are also completely out of their minds.

Until I was about thirteen I bought into this notion, fed me by my mother (who is American - this may or may not be relevant), at which point I realised that although appearance certainly does not reflect inner goodness, there is a lot to be gained in life by not looking as though you have just emerged from a witch's lair and/or the 1970s.

The same is true for books. A book can be beautifully written, but if it looks like ass then very few people are going to want to get close enough to it to discover this fact. Conversely, you can disguise almost any content within a package that promises a certain reading experience and people will go mad for it - and if you don't believe me, consider the recent re-release of Wuthering Heights, cunningly disguised as teen romance.

Its target market might not typically touch a Bronte with a bargepole, but because the cover of this edition tells them that it's Edward and Bella's favourite book, their minds are suddenly filled with desire and they buy three copies on a whim. Or at least that is the theory. (Even though I'd love to get snooty about this concept, by the way, I'm fairly sure that the Brontes would have gone absolutely mental for Twilight, given their fondness for angry, brooding males. Much as I hate to admit it, this is one bit of marketing that they are probably heavily endorsing from beyond the grave).

Book covers can also totally influence the way you think about a particular story for ever more. When I first read Jane Eyre, when I was twelve, I had the old Penguin Classics edition, a painting of a girl sewing in a garden. Now, beyond her taste in clothes and her punch-a-hole-in-a-wall-with-the-power-of-her-mind stare, this girl bears no physical resemblance to any of the book's descriptions of Jane, as she is a hefty lass with a hint of monobrow, but all the same she has become absolutely and forever my mental image of Jane.

These days I get irrationally annoyed whenever I see any other Generic Out Of Copyright Painted Lady taking her rightful spot on the front of Jane Eyre. Even worse, my Jane has now been given a gig pretending to be Dorothea on the front of Penguin's new edition of Middlemarch. SinceI know that Jane Eyre, if called upon to do so, could take Dorothea Brooke down, this is deeply offensive to my mind.

A good book cover, I think, ought to be eye-catching, good-looking and go some way towards explaining to a potential reader what the book is really about. One of my all-time favourites is Penguin's cover for On the Road, which is just brilliant in its simplicity.

Here is a book, it seems to say, that is all about male friendship (friendship? friendship), with main characters that are closely based on real people who have been elevated into Icons of Hipness. They're badass, they're cool, and don't you want to buy this book and become just like them? I bet you do. I know I do. Or maybe I just really fancy Jack Kerouac.Whichever.

So, in conclusion, covers matter. A good one can boost sales and a bad one can crush the selling potential of its book like a bug. If I had to make a list of my favourites I'd be here all day, but some of the ones I'm fond of at the moment include: Amitav Ghosh's River of Smoke (so blue! so swirling!); Rachel Hunt's Mr Chartwell (the dog looks like Winston Churchill, genius); Alexi Zentner's Touch (I am a sucker for gold leaf) and the repackage of China Mieville's backlist to coincide with the release of Embassytown (I just want to buy them all because they are so creepily attractive.)

Beautful.