‘The Marriage Plot’ author to speak in Pittsburgh

‘The Marriage Plot’ author to speak in Pittsburgh
October 22, 2012

By Justin Karter

Published on Point Park News Service

In his latest book The Marriage Plot, Pulitzer-prize winning author Jeffrey Eugenides delved into the lives and minds of college students as they navigated literature and semiotics, anxieties about graduation, sexual desires, and romantic relationships.

On Monday Oct. 22 Eugenides will speak in Pittsburgh at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland to an audience expected to be largely composed of students from local universities. Eugenides will be the third in a series of ten lectures in the 2012-13 season of Literary Evenings, Monday Night Lecture Series, presented by Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures and sponsored by the Drue Heinz Trust.

“Jeffrey Eugenides is one of America’s finest contemporary novelists. Young protagonists like Madeleine Hanna and Calliope Stephanides and their stories of searching for love in an imperfect world have resonated with younger adult readers. This will be Jeff’s first appearance in Pittsburgh and we are expecting a big turn-out of students from local universities,” said Jayne Adair, Executive Director of Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures.

His latest release, a New York Times best-seller, The Marriage Plot, tells the story of three college students graduating from Brown University- Eugenides’ alma mater- into the recession of mid-80’s. The novel examines the psychology of all three characters and demonstrates how the books they read and the classes they take shape not only their relationships with one another but also their understanding of the world.

In the novel, the privileged, pretty and literary Madeleine, who loves the traditional romantic narratives of Eliot, Austen and Bronte, opts to take a trendy new course in semiotics. The class deconstructs the novel (and reality) as she knows it. Madeleine meets her eventual boyfriend, the intellectually curious but manic depressive Leonard, a gifted biology student with a troubled past. As her roller-coaster relationship with Leonard rises and falls, Madeleine continuously moves the frustrated, religio-philosophical Mitchell in and out of the friend-zone, while he quests across Europe and India for spiritual truth. The book’s title fittingly plays on the relationship between fiction and reality, referring to Madeleine’s senior thesis, which mourns the decreased sense of permanence in contemporary western novels due to changing societal norms concerning marriage.

“As somebody who studied literature in college, the novel appealed to me,” said Gabrielle Langmann, a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and a current Medical Student at UPMC. “I think it captured how we all felt in college– trying to figure out what we are doing with our lives and coming up with a worldview that is uniquely our own.”

Eugenides is expected to speak to the Pittsburgh crowd about his career as a writer and his previous works but the majority of the lecture will be focused on on The Marriage Plot, explained Eryn Morgan, Marketing Manager of Pittsburgh Arts and Lectures. “We brought him in the talk about The Marriage Plot, so that will be the topic of the lecture,” she said. She added that she expects to see a large number of students in the audience on Monday night.

Eugenides found continued success when his first novel, 1993’s The Virgin Suicides, was adapted for film by director Sofia Coppola. In 2003 Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize with his second novel: Middlesex, a multi-generational story of a family of Greek immigrants centered on the experience of Calliope, a hermaphrodite growing up in Detroit.

Eugenides grew up in Detroit and is of Greek-American ancestry. He studied at Brown University and received his M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University. He is currently a Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton University.

Student tickets are $10 with an ID and are available by phone at 412-622-8866 or at the Carnegie Music Hall Box Office on the night of the program.