The Marriage Plot

I...wish I liked this more. I really loved both of Eugenides' other novels. I think I get where he was trying to go, with regard to tongues in cheeks, but my main struggle as a reader was with consistency. I felt grabbed once in a while, but variations in tone both within and across characters really left me feeling disconnected. I found myself wanting to finish not because I was desperate to find out how things wrapped up (too neatly, in my opinion), but because I wanted to stop reading. I feel sad about that. Finally, for the first time in reading Eugenides, I got the vibe that he's Franzen adjacent, which I don't mean as a compliment. I want more from fiction; in particular, I want bigger risks and more authorial commitment to them.