The Marriage Plot book club questions

1. 1.

   Madeleine chooses Leonard over Mitchell in part because Leonard is more interesting, more alive. Does the novel endorse that choice, critique it, or simply show it?

2. 2.

   Leonard's bipolar disorder means that the person Madeleine loves is partly constituted by an illness. The novel asks whether that distinction is even coherent. Where do you come down?

3. 3.

   Mitchell is often read as the most autobiographical character — the earnest, spiritually restless intellectual. Is he the novel's moral center or its least interesting figure?

4. 4.

   The setting is Brown in the early 1980s, thick with French theory and semiotics. Does the academic context feel authentic to you, or does it feel like period costuming?

5. 5.

   Madeleine studies the marriage plot academically but lives inside one. Does her literary knowledge ever actually help her?

6. 6.

   The novel ends ambiguously. Did you feel that ambiguity was earned by the preceding 400 pages, or did it feel like evasion?

7. 7.

   Compare Madeleine to other literary heroines who are also readers — Emma Woodhouse, Isabel Archer, Dorothea Brooke. In what tradition does she belong, and what does Eugenides do differently?

8. 8.

   Mitchell's time working for Mother Teresa in Calcutta is one of the novel's more polarizing sections. Did you find it earned its place in the book?

9. 9.

   The novel was published in 2011 but set in 1982. Does the period matter? Could this story work in a contemporary setting?

10. 10.

    The title promises a marriage plot but the novel ends without one. Is that a kept promise or a broken one?

11. 11.

    Eugenides's three novels are very different from each other. How does The Marriage Plot fit with The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex as a body of work?

12. 12.

    Which of the three characters did you find most sympathetic, and did that change over the course of the novel?

How to run the discussion

• Pick six to eight, not all of them. An hour of real discussion covers fewer questions than anyone expects, and racing the list is what makes a book club feel like homework.
• Open with what people noticed, not what they concluded. Asking for a verdict first hardens opinions before anyone has heard each other.
• Let the disagreement run. The questions below that split a room are the ones worth the time; the ones everyone answers the same way can be skipped.
• Ask the quiet person a specific question. A direct, narrow question is far easier to answer than an open invitation to contribute.