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anderlawlor

anderlawlor

Currently reading

Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert, Lydia Davis
Siddhartha
Hermann Hesse, Hilda Rosner
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Collected Essays)
Henry David Thoreau
The Children Star
Joan Slonczewski
Manstealing for Fat Girls
Michelle Embree
Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New
Audre Lorde
Radio Crackling, Radio Gone
Lisa Olstein
Radiant Days
Elizabeth Hand
Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction
Margaret Killjoy, Kim Stanley Robinson
Footnotes in Gaza
Joe Sacco

The Marriage Plot: A Novel

The Marriage Plot - Jeffrey Eugenides First off, I really hated MIDDLESEX (horrifyingly binary ideas about gender, location of intersex bodies' origin in incest, etc), so I was predisposed to dislike THE MARRIAGE PLOT.I read it anyway because I love Barthes' A LOVER'S DISCOURSE and because the novel sounded like it might be critical in an interesting way of the elite liberal arts college industrial complex, or at least a fun romp through a cultural moment. But no.Again I found Eugenides basic worldview repellant, uninteresting, and badly observed. I don't trust his depiction of straight women and am bored by his depiction of straight men. The story is about a heterosexual love triangle and the woman operates pretty exclusively as an object to bring the men together (I'm thinking of Sedgwick's BETWEEN MEN here). On a very basic level, this novel doesn't pass the Bechdel test. And there's weird class stuff, all this unexamined privilege. I just really dislike and distrust Eugenides's authorial worldview and I also didn't think it was particularly well-written or plotted. I mean, the writing was *fine* but really not special to me.