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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 Elliot, 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 suitors, intervenes.Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner and college Darwinist - turns up at a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged relationship with him. At the same time, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus - who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his wife. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle graduate from college and enter the real world, they will be forced to re-evaluate everything.
Are the great love stories of the 19th century dead? Or can there be a story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, pre-nups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffery Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.
Soft cover, very good condition. 406 pages.
