The American Reader isn’t your average literary magazine. The Princeton grads who run it have barely closed their second issue, and already it is being hailed as the next Paris Review or n+1.

But Uzoamaka Maduka, the 25-year-old editor in chief, doesn't go in for the comparison. She’s looking for wider appeal.

“There’s a way in which both the larger society and the literary world have collaborated in allowing the literary world to be very hermetic and recede from the daily back and forth of culture,” she told The Observer over coffee last week at Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee in the West Village

Ms. Maduka, who goes by Max, and her boyfriend, Jac Mullen, came up with the idea for a new magazine on Mr. Mullen’s fire escape last winter while having yet another of their countless conversation about what’s wrong with the state of literature. They wanted something serious-minded that focused on Literature (with a capital‘L’)rather than the literary scene. They wanted to prove that their generation could read more than tweets. With funding from an anonymous donor, they  began reaching out to people they knew from college, like Alyssa Loh, their digital editor, who lives in the 10th Street apartment where they had their party.

Then they started pulling in the big guns. Mr. Mullen emailed one of his favorite contemporary writers—now Ben Marcus is the fiction editor. Ms. Maduka got in touch with Dean Young, her favorite poet—he is now their poetry editor.

“It’s like when you have a kid or a friend and you’re willing to do things on their behalf that you wouldn’t do for yourself,” Ms. Maduka said. “I would never email Dean Young and be like, ‘Let’s hang out.’ But I would for the magazine.”

Or maybe it’s the brazenness of youth.

“We are young, and when you are young, you have less inhibitions, and you just power through and don’t think about how it doesn’t make sense,” said the magazine’s 32-year-old creative consultant, Shala Monroque, a regular on the international art and fashion circuits who has been romantically linked with the art superdealer Larry Gagosian.

At their party, Ms. Maduka attributed the stylishness of the crowd to Ms. Monroque. Ms. Monroque attributed it to Ms. Maduka’s editorial vision.

“It was immediate, automatic; I was really inspired by what Max was saying about the magazine,” Ms. Monroque said. “I’m often really bored at fashion parties, and it’s nice to get to have intelligent conversations.”

Ms. Monroque was introduced to Ms. Maduka through the Reader’s editor at large Stephanie La Cava, whom Ms. Maduka met at a PEN event. The other editor at large is writer Sage Mehta, a fellow Princeton alum and a recognizable face on the literary circuit.

It’s an impressive masthead, and some of the credit for that is likely due to the editor’s persona.

Despite her youth, Ms. Maduka, who is Nigerian-American, is a commanding presence. Part of that is due to her height—she is over six feet tall—but it also comes from her style. An afternoon coffee merited an ankle-length black dress, dangly zig-zag-shaped rhinestone earrings, an oversize quilted black coat and liquid eyeliner.

“She is always so well-dressed,” said Ms. Monroque, who knows from well-dressed, being creative director of the art and fashion magazine Garage. “The first time I met her, she had on this blue turban to the side and her Afro hair was sticking out. She looked like a different version of the girl with the pearl earring. And then she opens her mouth and immediately is impressive.”

Impressive, but not aloof or off-putting. Ms. Maduka comes across as just another 25-year-old aspiring to work in the lit world, as though she could have climbed the editorial ranks at The New Yorker or Harper’s but instead decided to start her own thing, and just happened to meet the right people at the right time.

Ms. Maduka met Mr. Mullen, the magazine’s co-founder and executive editor, during her senior year at Princeton, when she was editor in chief of the student-run Nassau Weekly, the highbrow humor and arts alt weekly that was co-founded by David Remnick and John McPhee. Mr. Mullen, a year below her, wrote for the Nass.

“Working at The Nassau Weekly really primed me as a thinker and a critical writer,” she said. “I can’t imagine I’d be doing anything I’m doing today if I didn’t write for the Nass.”

Her path to The American Reader was somewhat circuitous. After graduation, she did a stint as an au pair in Switzerland, then wrote in Croatia for three months. Mr. Mullen took a year off of college to tag along. Back in America, Ms. Maduka interned for Verso Books, an independent publisher of mostly translated political theory.

Ms. Maduka grew up in Columbia, Maryland—a planned community between Washington and Baltimore. For her, the title The American Reader has something of a personal resonance: she is the only member of her intimidatingly accomplished family who was born in America. Her father, who emigrated from Nigeria with the rest of the family right before Ms. Maduka was born, is a doctor, her mother a chemical engineer. She has two older brothers who work in finance, and a sister who worked for the Clinton Foundation’s HIV/Aids Initiative, was the dean of Oprah Winfrey’s Leadership Academy and got an MBA from Harvard.

“I benefited from being raised always on the edge of something,” Ms. Maduka said. “I’m black, but I’m not African-American. I’m African. I’m Catholic. That sense of constantly being lost in translation allows me to stay marginal in a way.”

She is aware of something that many magazine editors probably don’t often stop to notice—that she is operating in a white world.

“The literary scene in New York is one of the last bastions of white male privilege,” Ms. Maduka said over coffee, explaining that it there is still a narrow framework for diversity. “Even when you bring in women or people of color, it’s still, like, Harvard, Princeton, Yale. I went to an Ivy. Look at what I’m wearing”—she gestured at her dress, rhinestone earrings, quilted coat—“This is ridiculous.”

The magazine is run out of a spacious Washington Heights office that doubles as Mr. Mullen’s apartment. Ms. Maduka lives nearby in a townhouse full of Juilliard students she found on Craigslist.

Visiting The American Reader HQ on a recent Sunday afternoon, The Observer was greeted at the door by Ms. Maduka, who was casually stylish in a long black jersey skirt and a striped sweater. Mr. Mullen, in jeans and a blazer, was fighting a cold—he’d spent too much of Friday’s party on the chilly roof.

Books were stacked on the floor in the living room, and dishes were piled in the kitchen sink. Mr. Mullen’s grandmother’s paintings hung on the walls. French doors separated the living room from the office, where whiteboards and Post-It notes spoke to the challenges of putting out a monthly magazine with a skeletal staff.

Before we left the office, Mr. Mullen asked us if we wanted to join him for a smoke on the fire escape. “That’s where a lot of this happens,” he explained.

Standing on the catwalk-like aerie overlooking an alley, Ms. Maduka pointed to a dead pigeon on the landing. “We were trying to get the super to take care of that, but he gave up,” she said. “That’s where the glamour ends. The other night, we came home after the party and there was a dead pigeon.”

But as for the glamour, it would seem that, on the contrary, it is just beginning. At the party on Friday night, best-selling authors were among those singing happy birthday to Mr. Mullen. He was turning 25.

"Jeffrey Eugenides doesn't have a book out this summer," says the ad, styled to look like the Times Square The Marriage Plot billboard that FSG shelled out for, "but Jennifer Weiner has... The Next Best Thing."

The Next Best Thing is the title of the book, misogynists.

Who do you think wore the vest better?

Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]>

Photo by Ricardo Barros

Woe betide our republic of letters! The shadowy culture arbiters who serve on the Pulitzer Prize board have withheld their favor from the field of American novels published in 2011. Booksellers, writers and critics have been up in arms ever since news of the non-award broke in mid-April. In a cri de coeur published in the New York Times’s op-ed pages, novelist Ann Patchett—who also runs an independent bookstore in Nashville—decried the committee’s abstention as a cause for “indignation” and, indeed, “rage.”

“I can’t imagine there was ever a year when we were so in need of the excitement the [fiction Pulitzer] creates in readers,” Ms. Patchett wrote.

It’s easy to miss, amid Ms. Patchett’s vehemence, the patent condescension that prize-dependent marketing visits upon American readers. In her distinctly arid account of readerly engagement, news of a prestigious laurel is what’s needed to generate “the buzz,” as she puts it, “that is so often lacking.” But the question is far better turned on its head: If an entire industry must rely on aloof prize boards to gin up sustained interest, then the trouble would seem to be the industry itself, rather than the prize boards or the consumers.

This was, after all, the identical argument that publishing executives trotted out in favor of Oprah Winfrey’s relentlessly middle-brow book club when Dame Oprah threatened its retirement, and when Jonathan Franzen sullied it with his sniveling high-brow criticisms: If we sacrifice Oprah’s market-making might, then surely the sky will fall! the collective wail then went; without patient tutelage from the sovereign of daytime talk, it was thought, Americans would revert to simply using books to squash bugs or prop open their outhouse windows. In reality, of course, publishers survived the withdrawn patronage of the Big O just fine—and far from being starved for reliable advice, readers can glean literary recommendations, opinions and argument from a wider range of sources than ever, thanks largely to the explosion of online literary sites.

Funnily enough, the brunt of Ms. Patchett’s indictment was being disproved even as it was published: Thanks to the coverage surrounding the non-awarding of the 2012 Pulitzer, sales of all three finalists werespiking; one of those titles, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, had even sold out in hardcover on Amazon. (My own informal canvass of half-a-dozen Manhattan bookstores last week likewise failed to turn up a single copy of Train Dreams.) These initial returns suggested two healthy correctives to the general publishers’ alarm. First, self-generated debate over literary judgments, even of the sort kicked up by this gnat-straining controversy, is at least as capable of sparking book sales as a ceremonial annual honor. And second, it’s generally far healthier for three books to occupy the center of said debate than a single fawned-over honoree—in pretty much the same way that it’s a far greater civic boon to have three political parties than one.

But there are other, more fundamental reasons to look askance at the business of award-driven fiction. The kind of literary consensus championed by Ms. Patchett tends to work as a de facto restraint on trade in the marketplace of ideas. That is to say, to the extent that readers look to prizes to arbitrate their own tastes, the already cloistered enterprise of literary fiction narrows further, to a charmed circle of writers publishing works by, for and about the types of people who pursue and win literary prizes. Take two highly praised novels of the past year that didn’t place as Pulitzer finalists but have earned lavish attention as prize-worthy works: Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding and Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot. Both are studies in star-crossed individuation among a cloistered intellectual class; and as befits the earlier fictional traditions each novel cribs widely from, they hew closely to gender stereotype, with The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine Hanna embarking on a lifelong quest for a satisfying love relationship, and Mr. Harbach’s protagonist, Henry Skrimshander, finding metaphysical repose in old-fashioned male camaraderie and the pursuit of excellence on the baseball diamond. In a very different register, David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published and Pulitzer-nominated novel, The Pale King, projects the self-aware, multilayered quest for authentic experience onto the lumbering federal bureaucracy of the IRS, fragmenting the author’s own identity across the book’s unfinished pages.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with literate, knowing fiction revolving around the inner lives of articulate young achievers—and Messrs. Eugenides, Wallace and Harbach all render the central struggles of their protagonists with narrative assurance. Still, nearly all the action in these signature 2011 fictions takes place through a distracting scrim of writerly meditation on writing, which tends to leave readers feeling a bit obtrusive. Wallace’s corps of IRS auditors, toiling earnestly away behind their desks and pencils in the 1980s, are clearly stand-ins for the authors of fiction, casting about for some deeper sense of meaning amid an American entertainment public, that, much like the taxpaying clientele in The Pale King, has little use for their efforts. Mr. Harbach’s ballplayers likewise are perfecting a militantly counterutilitarian pride of craft—and are surrounded by a raft of allusions to the work of Herman Melville, for good measure. Meanwhile, The Marriage Plot is so steeped in obsessive MFA-style self-examination that it derives its title from Madeleine’s senior English thesis on the Victorian novel.

This isn’t the first time, by the way, that the Pulitzer committee has taken a flyer on the fiction award—the Prize has gone unclaimed on 10 prior occasions, the last time in 1977. And indeed, the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for fiction was widely perceived as a make-up laurel. In 1918, the committee gave the prize to the radical proletarian novelist Ernest Poole for a book called His Family. It was commonly understood, though, that the Pulitzer board was actually honoring Poole’s far better 1915 novel, The Harbor, which chronicled a journalist’s conversion to the working-class cause amid a general strike that paralyzed New York Harbor. As he ponders the fateful step toward radical commitment, Billy, the novel’s narrator, proposes forsaking his successful career lionizing the age’s industrial titans in favor of something in a more social realist vein. Seeking to sum up his mounting distress to his wife—the daughter of one of Billy’s model captains of industry—he conjures the appeal of his next big journalistic subject: “Poverty, that’s what it is, and I’ve always steered way clear of it as though I were afraid to look. I’ve taken your father’s point of view and left the slums for him and his friends to tackle when they get the time. I was only too glad to be left out. But … I’m beginning to wonder now why I shouldn’t get up the nerve to see for myself, to have a good big look at it all.”

His wife, Eleanore, takes emphatic exception to the plan. “Her voice was so sharp it startled me,” Billy recounts: “‘You’re different,’ she answered. ‘You leave poverty alone and force yourself to go on with your work. You’ve made a very wonderful start. You’ll be ready to take up fiction soon.’”

]]> http://observer.com/2012/04/read-it-and-whine-writers-dont-need-prizes-they-need-ideas/feed/ 0 jhanasobserver Eugenides(MarriagePlot) Ricardo Barros http://observer.com/2011/11/scott-rudin-buys-film-rights-to-the-marriage-plot/#comments Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:06:10 -0400 http://observer.com/2011/11/scott-rudin-buys-film-rights-to-the-marriage-plot/ Emily Witt http://www.observer.com/?p=195750

Eugenides.

Scott Rudin has bought the film rights to Jeffrey Eugenides' bestselling novel The Marriage Plot, reports Deadline Hollywood. That's right: not HBO! So who will play which part? James Franco as Leonard Bankhead, right? And Jeffrey Eugenides' vest as Mitchell.

Mr. Eugenides has a long essay up at The Millions today about writing The Marriage Plot, but we're more interested in the wisdom dispensed by the vest. It really gets around town.

Via @PeterLattman.

The Wall Street Journal has followed up on that crazy Jeffrey Eugenides billboard in Times Square, first brought to our attention yesterday. We learn that the dashing photo of Mr. Eugenides was styled by no other than his wife, sculptor Karen Yamaguchi. FSG publicist Jeff Seroy says it "looks like the Marlboro Man, a classic billboard image.”

via @PeterLattman

Farrar, Strauss and Giroux pulls out the big guns for Jeffrey Eugenides: a billboard in Times Square, with the author purposefully striding forth in a manly vest. "Swoon-worthy." [via @PeterLattman]

Speaking of Jeffrey Eugenides, it turns out Leonard Bankhead was supposed to be more Axl Rose than David Foster Wallace. [WSJ]

An excerpt from 50 Cent's young adult novel Playground: The Mostly True Story of a Former Bully. "Living life on the edge has taught me a lot, like the fact that being mentally strong will get you ahead in life," writes the rapper 50 Cent, who confesses he once was a bully himself. "But being a bully won’t get you anywhere. Some kids don’t figure that out until it’s too late. Does Butterball? You’ll have to read the book to find out." Butterball is the main character. He's a bully. [Shelf Life]

Don DeLillo speaks on the anniversary of "the shot heard round the world." [Grantland]

Retracing Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas 40 years later. [The Daily]

The creative class is melting! [Salon]

More on that lawsuit that accuses book publishers of price fixing. [Paid Content]

Great Expectations wins readers' poll for best Charles Dickens novel. [Guardian]

Rock memoir of the day: Duran Duran's John Taylor is writing a book for Little, Brown. [Bookseller]

David Rakoff wins the Thurber Prize for humor writing. [AP]

On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.

Middlesex, by comparison, starts off rather colloquially, the phrasing less serpentine, more direct:

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

The opening of The Marriage Plot is just as telling, though it might not seem so at first:

To start with, look at all the books.

And that’s it. Eight words, one syllable each. A first sentence that is very short and very plain. Instead of suicide or sex-change we get … books. The rest of the novel follows from this premise, from this line forward, for better or for worse, for richer, for poorer—you get the idea. Because this novel is as much about books as it is a return to “the marriage plot” in so many of them, which makes this the most meta-fictional of Mr. Eugenides’s work, yet also the most conventional.

The story revolves around three college friends: Madeleine Hanna, a pretty, privileged young woman who must decide between Leonard Bankhead, wearer of David-Foster-Wallace-style bandannas and sufferer of manic depression, and Mitchell Grammaticus, whose old-man attire, relative mental stability and obvious interest in Madeleine makes him less alluring than his brooding rival. Both men woo her and mistreat her by turns. She follows Leonard from Providence to Pilgrim Lake (where he has a fellowship to study, appropriately, the mating habits of yeast), but she can’t get Mitchell out of her mind. Whom does she love? Whom will she marry?

So far, so ordinary. But wait: The Marriage Plot takes place in the early 1980s, when Derrida was the rage. Sure enough, Madeleine met Leonard in her last year at college (an institution clearly based on Brown, Mr. Eugenides’s alma mater), in a semiotics seminar that Madeleine, student of the Victorian novel, took despite herself, feeling the need for a “critical methodology.” She had already taken an honors class on “The Marriage Plot: Selected Novels of Austen, Eliot, and James,” in which she learned that “the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot.” Such novels, according to her professor, could be written only “in an age when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money,” and therefore the marriage plot can no longer exist. But clearly The Marriage Plot has a marriage plot. Let the meta-fictional games begin!

Mr. Eugenides, however, seems to have little interest in playing along, with all of the experimental gamesmanship that would entail. Instead he takes up the challenge in earnest: to write a sincere novel about love and marriage at a time when such a creature is supposed to be impossible. The students talk about Eco and Derrida in the semiotics seminar, Madeleine reads A Lover’s Discourse by Barthes, but The Marriage Plot makes no formal concessions that would divert it from its decidedly realist path. The meta-fictional elements seem to serve mainly as proof that Mr. Eugenides is in full consciousness and control of what he’s doing, to be tossed aside once his post-structuralist bona fides have been established. Madeleine’s distrust of all that phenomenology/intertextuality stuff appears to reflect something of the author’s own:

After getting out of Semiotics 211, Madeleine fled to the Rockefeller Library, down to B Level, where the stacks exuded a vivifying smell of mold, and grabbed something—anything, The House of Mirth, Daniel Deronda—to restore herself to sanity. How wonderful it was when one sentence followed logically from the sentence before! What exquisite guilt she felt, wickedly enjoying narrative! Madeleine felt safe with a nineteenth-century novel.

Much of what we learn about Madeleine is captured here, in this paragraph, in which her love of narrative makes for reading habits so furtive she might as well have hidden her Daniel Deronda in a brown paper bag. Mr. Eugenides could have pushed against Madeleine’s innocence—if not upending it, then at least complicating it, showing how such a sweet trust in logic and narrative can make for darkness as well as light. But the rest of the novel suggests that Madeleine is right to seek refuge in old-fashioned storytelling, for deconstruction is presented only as a destructive force: even Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, the one book on her semiotics reading list she actually enjoys, becomes a source of unpleasantness and heartache, when Leonard points to the text to show how her declaration of love  “‘has no meaning whatever … ’” Despondent, Madeleine later debases herself by joylessly servicing a pretentious, condescending classmate named Thurston Meems from Semiotics 211: “The wrongness of it was immediate. It went beyond the moral, straight to the biological. Her mouth just wasn’t the organ nature had designed for this function.” In The Marriage Plot, post-structuralism is an affront to nature that brings nothing but bad blow jobs and broken hearts.

Madeleine graduates about a third of the way into the novel, after which post-structuralism is banished and narrative reigns—skillful, elegant narrative that takes the characters from point A to B to C. The sex—red-blooded and American, rather than effete and Continental—gets better for Madeleine, though I began to long for the clinical detail with which her distaste for Thurston was described, especially when Mr. Eugenides whips out overheated words like “girth” and “inner sheath.” But the prose is otherwise so lucid and polished that it would be churlish to find fault with it, except to say that such lucidity and polish is characteristic not only of the sentences but of nearly everything else in this novel, which reads as if lucidity and polish were not just an aesthetic but an ideological point of pride.

To be sure, the men have their moments of tortured self-doubt, as Leonard gets manic after cutting down on his meds and Mitchell has a spiritual awakening that takes him to and from Mother Teresa’s Home for the Dying in Calcutta. Madeleine, for her part, becomes “aware of the capacity in herself for a helpless sadness not unlike clinical depression” (the epiphany comes after some boy trouble). But their seeking takes them toward narrative, toward clarity, whereas it’s the devils of mental illness and lofty theorizing that lead them astray. A minor female character is presented as particularly unlikable for being enamored of French feminist theory; this woman (an annoying American in Paris, bien sûr) functions mainly as a cartoonish “critic of patriarchy” who spouts out self-righteous, humorless platitudes that do nothing other than make Mitchell feel bad and make her look worse. Some of Mitchell’s classmates, in thrall to post-colonialism, believe “that Western religion was responsible for everything bad in the world,” and Mitchell valiantly makes an impassioned case for the defense. Although The Marriage Plot is decidedly a love story, the insertion of so many antipolitical sentiments inevitably has some political implications. The overall sense one gets from this novel is that the West, besieged by the fashionable isms that gathered momentum during the ’70s, has gotten a bum rap.

All of which makes The Marriage Plot so conventional a novel that it’s thoroughly bizarre. In his earlier works, Mr. Eugenides has shown a marvelous talent for excavating the darker recesses and ambiguities of American culture: Cal in Middlesex feels confined and confused by gender and family, in all of their fluidity and finality; the sisters in The Virgin Suicides kill themselves for reasons ultimately unknown. The Marriage Plot harbors no such secrets, which renders it more opaque than its predecessors, for guilelessness in a novel can conceal more than it reveals. The Virgin Suicides’s sisters, whose lives are described only through whatever glimpses the neighborhood narrators can discern, are richer, rounder characters than The Marriage Plot’s Madeleine, who is a bland figure of smooth surfaces. With Madeleine Hanna, what we see is what we get.

There are several moments when Mr. Eugenides makes gestures to the larger problems a young woman might face—Madeleine is dismayed by the arrogance with which Bobby Riggs jumped the net as if he hadn’t just lost the match to Billie Jean King; Madeleine’s older sister warns about the old-fashioned gender inequality that can poison even the most modern of marriages—but, like the litcrit theory the young heroine abhors, they are treated more like nuisances to be duly noted than the stubborn impasses of a genuine struggle. Even Madeleine’s own marital problems are sad without ever seeming tragic; the alternative to marriage for this bright, 22-year-old woman with an Ivy League degree and wealthy, supportive parents is just a bit more time spent in her cozy childhood bedroom, with its Madeline-papered walls.

What Mr. Eugenides is clearly striving for here is a reinvention of the marriage plot for a different age, though I suspect a number of female authors writing in the genre known as “chick lit” would lay claim to having done just this already. If the question, then, is one of literary credibility, it would be a bitter irony if, at a time of so many marriage plots conceived by women, the one that ends up getting the most critical accolades is the one written by a man.

editorial@observer.com

Rangel.

 

Wednesday, August 3

The Ultimate Art Machine

Is the Guggenheim the Shake Shack of museums? Locations, locations, locations! Not content with outposts in the Basque Country and the United Arab Emirates (as well as the now-shuttered Las Vegas outpost, which seems in retrospect a bit of an overreach…to expect real culture to take hold in the land of bilk and money), the Guggenheim is now creating a mobile lab, opening today, that will set up shop in nine cities over six years in a quest to spur discussion on urban life. The slow migration of the auto-company-sponsored BMW Guggenheim Lab (a mobile laboratory isn’t cheap, dears!) begins in New York with the erection of a mobile structure themed around “Confronting Comfort.” (While the Guggenheim Lab is referring to balancing individual desire with the common good, surely you’ll be reminded that a new BMW forces you to “confront comfort” in a whole new way!) Catch it while you can—the mobile lab jaunts to Berlin next, then on to a yet-to-be-announced city in Asia.

BMW Guggenheim Lab, 33 East First Street, opens today from 1-9pm, visit guggenheim.org for more information.

Thursday, August 4

Single-Source Stories

When we hear “Talking Head,” we think rock star/bicycle enthusiast David Byrne, of course—we see that guy everywhere! But some talking heads come on reels, not wheels: the Anthology Film Archives continue their Talking Head screening series of documentary films featuring testimonials from a single individual. The mini-genre’s rife with unreliable narrators and charismatic characters: today brings screenings of The Confessions of Winifred Wagner (about Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law and her friendship with Adolf Hitler) and Martin Scorsese’s Italianamerican and American Boy (regarding, respectively, his parents and the Taxi Driver actor Steven Prince).

Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue, The Confessions of Winifred Wagner at 6:45pm, Italianamerican and American Boy at 9pm, visit anthologyfilmarchives.org for tickets and information.

Friday, August 5

Soundgarden

This weekend, the Shinnecock Indian reservation, in Southampton, is invaded by hordes even wilder than cigarette buyers looking for a tax-free carton. The Escape to New York music festival brings electro-loving ravers in for a weekend spent sleeping in campers (it’s glamorous camping, or “glamping,” for the Sunday Styles set), listening to music and enjoying all the good, clean fun the Hamptons have to offer. Tonight, noted memoirist Patti Smith and girl-group-but-not-in-the-Phil-Spector-way Best Coast perform on the main stage. It’s not just music and glamping (something about that word—we just can’t take ourselves seriously when we say it!): the organizers were responsible for the U.K.’s Secret Garden Party, an annual festival that transforms a manor house’s grounds into what a Telegraph reporter described as “a fairy woodland filled with strange sculptures” and “a Tower of Babel disco.” If this all sounds a bit foreign to you, gentle partygoing reader, know that in bringing a manic all-weekend festival to the States, the organizers adopted one indigenous custom: there will be a massive brunch for all attendees. Glamorous!

Escape to New York runs through August 7, Shinnecock Reservation (Southampton), visit escape2ny.com for tickets and information.

Saturday, August 6

Newport Lights

If you find yourself among the Gilded Age relics in Newport tonight (we mean the mansions, not the social set), contribute to the preservation of one grand home. Once owned by Pennsylvania coal baron Edward Julius Berwind and modeled after a French chauteau, the house at the Elms is fine ($1.4 million in 1901 money could buy you a pretty sturdy house), but its carriage house and stables are in need of a pick-me-up. Tonight’s black-tie dinner dance—whose theme is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”--will raise money for Newport’s Preservation Society, which plans to turn the stables of The Elms from equine domicile into a historical society devoted to researching the town’s architectural history. Let’s make sure that horsey smell is powerwashed out before the important work of this research center begins!

The Elms, 367 Bellevue Avenue (Newport, R.I.), 7pm, call (401) 847-1000 x120 for reservations.

Sunday, August 7

McQueen for a Day

The Met is open until midnight tonight so that late, late latecomers can check out Alexander McQueen’s wares before the exhibit closes permanently. A night spent experiencing the glories of the museum? We remember that children’s book! Most everyone we know has raved about the Costume Institute show, but we’ve been pretty busy all summer (the Newport mansions can’t save themselves, you know, and there’s pretty intriguing costumery to check out there as well!), and the museum’s been bending over backwards to accommodate busy (lazy!) people like us all summer, with admission on Mondays and now late-night shows. Is any innovation quite so welcome in this go-go city as a museum for the nocturnal? We hope the trend catches on—nothing would lull us to sleep quite like the soft glow of MoMA’s Rothkos. (We do love McQueen, too, but we’re sure those severe, radical clothes will give us a few nightmares!)

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, exhibition open until 12am August 6 and 7, visit metmuseum.org for more information.

Monday, August 8

Day for Night

We’re still vicariously embarrassed for dear old drama geek Anne Hathaway in her noble, pathetic attempt to host the Oscars by sheer force of will. She tried so very hard! She laughed at her own jokes to fill cavernous silences! Well, her new film might have put the brakes on her earnest, overbearing schtick and given us the chance to remember why we loved her in the first place. Ms. Hathaway, as a British lady separated from her one true love but for an annual brief encounter, puts her high-school-production-of-Oliver! on for the new film One Day, which she’s fêteing at the red carpet premiere tonight. Do you think Ms. Hathaway’s erstwhile Oscar co-host James Franco would consider it a suitable art project to come as our plus-one?

One Day premiere, an Upper West Side movie palace, screening at 7pm.

Wednesday, August 10

Rangel Me an Invite

It’s Christmas for politicos with the annual Charles Rangel birthday gala (the Congressman was born in June, but that’s not a slow news month that will guarantee headlines!). Planned attendees at the Plaza Hotel bash include Governor Andrew Cuomo, Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Charles Schumer, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer—all familiar faces from last year’s bash, which went on during Mr. Rangel’s ethics investigation. Also planning to attend is Aretha Franklin, who’ll sing for the assembled guests: she was supposed to sing last year, but fell and broke her ribs, so Psychic Friend Dionne Warwick turned up instead. Broken ribs are perhaps the only excuse that can keep prominent machers away from the ever-popular Mr. Rangel: “I felt bad—because Aretha felt so bad!,” said Mr. Rangel’s fundraising consultant Darren Rigger, who noted that Ms. Franklin was pleased to make up for her truancy. As for the party--why the Plaza and not, you know, something in Mr. Rangel’s district? “Charlie is iconic,” said Mr. Rigger. “We needed a place that had that same feel—you remember the Black and White Balls, the galas, it sends a powerful message. There’s a lot of places, and I’m not going to say bad things about other places, but this place is iconic for throwing a gala.” Indeed! If Truman Capote were alive today, he’d love nothing more than hanging out with New York politicians.

Plaza Hotel Grand Ballroom, Fifth Avenue at Central Park South, 6pm-8pm, visit charlierangel.org for tickets and information.

Train, in vain.

Last week, The Observer discovered that before Middlesex writer Jeffrey Eugenides got socked in the face on NJ Transit, he enjoyed a $520 meal -- complete with wine, cocktails, and deep conversation -- from celebrated Central Park seafood spot Marea. His partner for the night was Farrar, Straus & Giroux head honcho Jonathan Galassi. They ate a lot of fancy fish and probably enjoyed themselves!

It's too bad, then, that the author of this Fall's anticipated novel The Marriage Plot got pelted by a guy screaming a song about his testicles.

We obtained a receipt indicated what contributed to the massive dinner bill, but our info on the drama on board the train was limited to the source that reached out to Page Six (Mr. Eugenides declined to comment).

Limited, that is, until today. An eyewitness reached out to The Observer to set the record straight on the goons abusing Mr. Eugenides and his car-mates. The whole obscenity-laden scene is a bit more, um, fleshed out now.

Our man on the scene is a 29-year-old who works in real estate. He was headed to his central New Jersey home from the city after finishing a class at NYU and a "night out with a lady."

The tipster, who asked that we not disclose his name, was seated a few seats away from the writer. Like the hostess at Marea, he had no idea who the man was. Man, it's tough being a writer these days! You'd think that if Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett starred in the movie adapted from your book, you'd get a few head turns, right?

Here's the start of the tale:

Myself and my date were seated a few seats away from the gentleman –- who never identified himself throughout the ordeal, nor did anyone know who he was, although we found it odd that he was wearing a scarf in 90 degree weather –- the sign of a mentally disturbed person –- or a putlizer [sic] prize winner...

Style takes sacrifice, tipster! OK, sorry, go on:

The group was a bunch of 4 teenagers – no older than 21, two men, two women, the two men were highly inebriated, the women were screaming before they sat down “oh boy this is going to be a crazy ride” clearly they all had a combined IQ no higher than 10, and probably have no idea what a Pulitzer Prize is, nor how to pronounce it. The Twitter user is just merely using the situation to incite his apparent disdain for Mr Eugenides. Their MO during the entire trip was cursing (not just about their genitals) and they were told numerous times to be quiet by the passengers on the train, particularly because there were children all over the place.. Apparently Mr Eugenides had enough and smacked the cell phone out of their hand.. The drunk got up in his face, and was confronting him when suddenly he punched him in the face, then his whole group ran away to another car. When the train stopped at Newark Penn Station, the doors were not opened until NJ Transit police got there and they apprehended the suspect. The NJ Transit Police asked numerous bystanders in the car to identify the assailant and everyone pointed out the correct person.

So it appears justice has been served. The witness also insisted that the Twitter user who fessed up to the crime -- “@cyberhack7” -- was a fake, as the attackers were four in number and had no animus toward the author regarding his work.

And despite apathy toward the guy's novels -- "I had never heard of Mr Eugenides... nor do I really care" -- the witness reiterated Paris Review editor Lorin Stein's claim that the man had proved himself a hero.

"I just feel bad for the nice guy who was just trying to keep peace and got fed up on a NJ Transit Train," the witness said.

As for Mr. Eugenides, we do hope he's recovering. Unlike others involved here, we do care about his fiction. As soon as our editor finishes his galley of Marriage Plot (hurry, dude!) we'll tear right into it.