Learning to Love

One hardly expects a Pulitzer Prize“winning novelist to treat religious faith in a sympathetic and sophisticated way, but Jeffrey Eugenides has written the unexpected. The Marriage Plot focuses on a small cast of characters, all students at Brown University in the early 1980s. Unlike Tom Wolfe’s cartoonish confection I Am Charlotte Simmons , Eugenides provides a far more emotionally accurate picture of the undergraduate lives of talented, morally disoriented college students. The atmosphere is decidedly post-sixties, which means libidinally liberated. But the main characters are spiritually anguished in all sorts of ways, each trying to attain a margin of maturity in a culture that provides them little help. They don’t want to be forever young.

Madeleine Hanna is an athletic, WASPy English major whose favorite authors are Jane Austen and George Eliot and who very much wants to be in love but lacks the emotional range and maturity to do so. Early in her years at Brown, she meets Mitchell Grammaticus. In his young imagination Madeleine becomes the perfect girl after whom he both lusts and wishes very much to love and marry. But she offers no encouragement. In her final semester, she falls under the charismatic spell of Leonard Bankhead, a handsome and brilliant fellow senior who crashes into depression just before graduation. Madeleine, confusing her intense desire to love with love itself, draws still closer to him, moving in with him after graduation. The two become more and more impossible as a couple, and the reader cannot help but feel a certain sympathetic agony when they all too believably but disastrously decide to get married.

Mitchell goes his own way. Reading Thomas Merton, St. John of the Cross, and Teresa of Avila as an undergraduate, he became increasingly aware of his own religious interests and desires. With vague but increasingly powerful spiritual impulses at work in his soul, he heads off for a postgraduate year of vagabonding in Europe and then India. In Athens he meets a born-again Christian. After talking with her he goes to the Acropolis, and there, falling down on his knees, he asks God for the power to speak in tongues. The divine does not give him so grand an outward sign, but he receives a quieter inward grace: a profound sense of how deeply he wishes to believe in God.

In Calcutta, he volunteers to work in one of the hospices run by Mother Teresa and after a few weeks of work is confronted by a dying man who has soiled his trousers and bed sheets. Unlike the volunteer from Arizona who says, “This is the body of Christ” while washing the dying, he cannot come to the man’s aid. He leaves, “knowing that he would regret this moment for a long time, maybe for the rest of his life.” His humiliating failure destroys the spiritual pride that has always been close to the surface of his youthful spiritual experiments.

After his year abroad, Mitchell meets the newly married Leonard and Madeleine at a party in New York City. The psychologically disintegrating Leonard seems to see what Madeleine needs, and he deserts her, sparing her the consequences of her illusions of love. Madeleine then turns to Mitchell for support. The way seems clear for a happy ending: The guy gets the girl he always dreamed of marrying, and the girl gets a guy who is a lot more stable and reliable.

But Eugenides draws this novel to a close with a more serious marriage plot. Mitchell returns with Madeleine to her parents’ house in a remote, leafy suburb. There she mourns her failed marriage. Over the course of the summer he goes to the Quaker meeting house on Sundays to sit in silence while others are moved by the Holy Spirit to speak.

At the end of August, on a Saturday night, Madeleine comes to his room, and they make love. The next morning, buoyed by bliss, Mitchell goes to the Quaker meeting, and for the first time all summer”for the first time in his life”the still, small voice speaks to him. As is nearly always the case for all of us who are captive to the glamorous fantasies of our egos, “it was saying things he didn’t want to hear.” Moved to tears, Mitchell realizes that it’s not just men who use women; women can use men. The night before, “Madeleine hadn’t been coming to him; she’d only been leaving [Leonard].”

What could God possibly have in mind by bringing to tears this young man who seemed to have found happiness? The answer, Eugenides suggests, involves the imitation of Christ. This final humiliation, which strips away his adolescent dream of marrying Madeleine, prepares Mitchell for his first adult act of love. Returning to the home of Madeleine and her parents, he does not press his long-sought claim to her heart. Instead, with graceful indirection he provides her with the opportunity to say she does not love him. Buffeted by his own spiritual poverty and in possession of painful self-knowledge, Mitchell Grammaticus lets go of his romantic fantasy, and in so doing he gives Madeleine, who is far behind him on love’s difficult road, the opportunity to begin to do the same.

For a long time transgression has been the calling card of the serious artist. Not so for Jeffrey Eugenides. The Marriage Plot has some salacious moments, but this is not a novel that celebrates transgression, nor is it designed to shock the bourgeoisie (or reassure them, as Tom Wolfe sometimes does). Instead, in this remarkable novel Eugenides wonders how the post-sixties generation”his generation and mine”can learn to move beyond pleasure and self-regard to love. His answer seems to be this: not by way of critique or irony, and certainly not through deconstruction, but instead by way of religious faith and spiritual discipline.