The Marriage Plot (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp.), the third novel by Pulitzer Prize winner Jeffrey Eugenides, profiles a love triangle with roots on the Brown University campus of the 1980s. Working through the loves and lives of his characters, Eugenides poses a literary question: Can the marriage plot of the 19th century matter to a 21st-century audience? Monitor critic Yvonne Zipp predicted that readers would find it “impossible not to be charmed by Eugenides’s defense” of the 19th-century novel. (CSMonitor.com, 10/14/11)
