{"id":700,"date":"2013-07-30T12:22:01","date_gmt":"2013-07-30T20:22:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=700"},"modified":"2013-07-30T12:22:01","modified_gmt":"2013-07-30T20:22:01","slug":"review-the-marriage-plot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2013\/07\/30\/review-the-marriage-plot\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: The Marriage Plot"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>
\n The Marriage Plot<\/a> by Jeffrey Eugenides<\/a>
\n My rating: 1 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

Boring.<\/p>\n

Characters I can\u2019t seem to like. No plot to speak of. A prose style that despite being plain doesn’t offer the pleasure of being perfunctory. Set in a places I don\u2019t care about, in a time I don\u2019t care about, a time of life that\u2019s more or less meaningless to examine. Started off as a three-star novel, and I only kept reading it because my wife is reading it and we like to read the same things sometimes so we can talk about them. And she only picked it because she read\u2014and said she liked\u2014Middlesex<\/i>. <\/p>\n

Struggled to get through even a page at a time, and so it became a two-star novel. Was a steady two as I slogged through. And then page 313. Total unmitigated bullshit. Made me sick to my stomach. Became a one. I am getting really tired of this misogynistic crap. I\u2019m no white knight, I\u2019m no feminist, I\u2019m not some kind of activist\u2014I\u2019m a middle-aged dude raised in the Midwest, so I\u2019m sure I\u2019m guilty of male privilege as anyone else. But I don\u2019t need to see yet another book, written by a man, where a woman is most fulfilled when she\u2019s gives herself, even for a few moments, to madness.<\/p>\n

What was good about the book? Uh, I don\u2019t know. The Franzian narrative style, the \u201ctell don\u2019t show\u201d that\u2019s nearly documentary. That let me get through pages quickly. The ending was good, because it meant I was done reading. Eugenides is more than capable of creating tension between characters, so there\u2019s that. <\/p>\n

But the pseudo-intellectual treatments of literature, criticism, religion, psychology? Bunk. Don\u2019t waste your time with this terrible novel. And be wary of blurbists who say its good. What else do they say is good? Avoid those too.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides My rating: 1 of 5 stars Boring. Characters I can\u2019t seem to like. No plot to speak of. A prose style that despite being plain doesn’t offer the pleasure of being perfunctory. Set in a places I don\u2019t care about, in a time I don\u2019t care about, a time … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Review: The Marriage Plot”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-700","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-bi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/700\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}