How Soon Is Vow?
He won a Pulitzer Prize and helped kick-start Sofia Coppola’s career as a director. Now, with his new novel The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides reimagines the 19th Century romance novel as 21st century social satire. He discusses his love of Joyce, the pressures of success and why it’s Colm Toibin’s round...
Roisin Dwyer, 06 Jan 2012
“Colm Toibin owes me a pint!” laughs Jeffrey Eugenides. “I just sold lots of his books last night in Waterstones in Picadilly! People were asking me what I had read recently that I liked, so I went on and on about The Empty Family. As they were coming up to get my book signed a lot of people had bought it, so I’m going to get him to buy me a drink tonight!”
Eugenides is on a gruelling book tour, to promote his third novel, The Marriage Plot, following on from the acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex and his highly lauded debut, The Virgin Suicides.
Exploring less rarified territory than the travails of a Greek hermaphrodite or the self-immolation of five sisters, it is nevertheless hugely compelling: in this instance the power lies primarily in the character analysis and development.
“I think creating character is probably the most difficult thing a novelist can do,” he muses sipping coffee in Dublin’s Morrison Hotel. “I learned a lot about creating characters with Middlesex. Usually when you finish a novel you have learned something in writing it and you feel like moving on to the next level. I just felt that I could give it a go this time and really have a character-driven book and let the characters dictate where the plot is going to go.”
The novel opens in Brown University on Graduation Day in 1982 and follows three students throughout the next 12 months: Madeline Hanna, an English literature major and incurable romantic, her boyfriend Leonard Bankhead and the third part of the love triangle, Mitchell Grammaticus, who is infatuated with the protagonist.
Like Eugenides, Grammaticus is of Irish and Greek descent, hails from Detroit and travels to India to do charity work, which begs the question, to what extent is he autobiographical?
“All of the characters have a lot of similarities to myself,” he states. “I can’t really write a character without pouring a lot of my own thoughts and feelings into each one. You divide yourself when you are writing a book and put a little bit of yourself into each character.
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