The Marriage Plot

　　睽違十年！《中性》作者傑佛瑞.尤金尼德斯最新作品

　　當珍.奧斯汀小說中的婚姻情結不再上演
　　文學/人生的高潮是否從此消逝？？

　　與上一本著作《中性》(The Middlesex)橫跨兩世代的大格局不同，尤金尼德斯新作《The Marriage Plot》的故事軸設定精簡，描寫三個大學生，從畢業到進入社會這一年間，面臨社會與人生、理想與現實的衝擊，故事設定於80年代的美國校園，彼時金融風 暴後年輕人對未來惶惶不安的心情，和當前景象更是若合符節。

　　本書主角瑪德連是個文學系主修生，聰穎美麗，浪漫的性格，卻好像錯置了時代。曾幾何時，她鍾愛的沙林傑、珍.奧斯汀、厄普代克漸漸沾上過時的灰塵，德希 達、羅蘭.巴特是一波新浪潮的領頭者。這些不按傳統邏輯、作風大膽的解構主義評論家，只讓瑪德連越來越困惑。另一個人物，雷奧納德，生物系學生，也是瑪德 連的男友，聰明絕頂，生長於貧困環境的他，積極求知，充滿活力但作風強勢。三角戀情的最後一端是米其，瑪德連在家鄉的青梅竹馬，主修宗教，在畢業那一年便 開始環遊世界旅行，最後落腳在德雷莎修女在印度的垂死之家擔任義工。性格迥異的三個人，也暗示了人生不同的選擇，什麼樣的配對才能有好的結局，書中精采、 睿智的故事轉折，讓閱讀者深陷其中。

　　《The Marriage Plot》在學術用語通常用來描述奧斯汀、艾略特作品中，那些男性對女性的示好、求婚的故事主軸。在現今講究男女平權、女性自由的年代，婚姻情結當然也愈 顯過時。面對這樣的轉變，究竟是好是壞？尤金尼德斯沒有直接回答這個問題，在小說中，他藉由垂垂老矣的教授教授口中說出，當婚姻的意義不再，文學的高峰也 從此消逝。或許，尤金尼德斯真正想說的，是傳統故事沒有什麼不好，但現代人總能夠找的新方法把傳統變複雜。

（文/薩蘭佳德）

　　A New York Times Notable Book of 2011
　　A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011
　　A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title
　　One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011
　　A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title
　　One of The Telegraph’s Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011

　　It’s the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafes on College Hill, 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 Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.

　　As Madeleine tries to understand why “it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,” real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual 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 mate.

　　Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can’t escape the secret responsible for Leonard’s seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love.

　　Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey 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.

作者簡介

　　Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. In 2003, Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex (FSG, 2002), which was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France’s Prix Medicis.