A National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist Named a Best Book of the Year by
The New York Times Book Review • NPR • The New Republic • Salon • The Seattle Times • Houston Chronicle • The Miami Herald • Publisher's Weekly  "Remind[s] us with uncommon understanding what it is to be young and idealistic, in pursuit of true love, and in love with books and ideas."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "A grand romance in the Austen tradition."—USA Today
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? It’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, 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 studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes---the charismatic and intense Leonard Bankhead, and her old friend the mystically inclined Mitchell Grammaticus. As all three of them face life in the real world they will have to reevaluate everything they have learned. Jeffrey Eugenides creates a new kind of contemporary love story in "his most powerful novel yet" (Newsweek).

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2. When Phyllida fell in love with Alton, she gave up her dream of becoming an actress in Hollywood. What sustains the Hannas’ marriage despite this sacrifice? How are Alwyn and Madeleine influenced by their parents’ marriage? Is Alwyn’s marriage to Blake a bad one? 
3. In Jeffrey Eugenides’s depiction of Brown University culture in the 1980s, what does it take for the students to impress one another and their professors? What might Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida have to say about the signs in Dr. Zipperstein’s Semiotics 211 class? 
4. Why is Madeleine more attracted to Leonard than to Mitchell? As she copes with Leonard’s instability and her feelings of guilt, how does mental illness shape the relationship?
5. What does Mitchell hope to discover as a student of religion? What role does religion play in his quest to be loved? Is his ideal—a religion devoid of myth and artificial social structures—attainable?
6. What does sex mean to Madeleine, Leonard, and Mitchell? Over the course of the novel, what do they discover about fantasy versus reality and the tandem between physical and emotional satisfaction?
7. What recurring themes did you detect in Mitchell’s trip overseas as he tries to manage his money, his love life, and Larry? Does he return to America a stronger, changed person or an amplified version of his college self?
8. What does Alwyn try to teach her little sister about being a woman by sending the Bachelorette’s Survival Kit? What does the kit help a woman survive?
9. Madeleine’s parents are affluent and have enough free time to stay very involved in her life. Does this liberate her, or does it give her less freedom than Leonard, who is often left to fend for himself?
10. In their chosen career paths after college, what are Leonard and Madeleine each trying to uncover about life? Does his work on the yeast-cell experiment have anything in common with her work on Victorian novels? 
11. Would you have said yes to Leonard’s marriage proposal? 
12. How does the novel’s 1980s setting shape the plot? Do twenty-first-century college students face more or fewer challenges than Madeleine did? 
13. Discuss the novel’s meta-ending (an ending about endings). Does it reflect reality? What were your expectations for the characters? 
14. Eugenides’s previous fiction has given us unique, tragicomic perspectives on oppressive families, gender stereotypes, and the process of trying to discover our true selves. How does The Marriage Plot enhance your reading of Eugenides’s other works?
15. Who did you become during your first year after college?

This book is on these lists:

• April 2013 Indie Next List
• March 2013 Indie Next List
• February 2013 Indie Next List