meeja I have consumed

[lotesse]

I know Eugenides has been making an ass of himself in public of late, but I really, really loved Middlesex. Like, loved it so hard. I'd been saving The Marriage Plot up for a while, because from the promo materials I was seeing it kind of looked like the fiction version of Sharon Marcus' Between Women, and that sounded like a cool thing.

The first part of the novel was hugely enjoyable for me, because it's simultaneously the story of my life (white girl writing on the nineteenth-century marriage plot, falling for postmodern theory, with a thing for Barthes) and a history of the foibles of the academic generation prior to mine. I really like college books, when people can pull them off - although it seems to be a difficult thing to do. I can only think of two off the top of my head: Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Anne of the Island. I found what Eugenides had to say about reading and criticism and love and desire really interesting, especially the stuff about how it feels to work critically on love while maybe not being in it.

The second part of the novel, after Madeleine and Leonard get together, was alternately boring and painful for me - painful because argh yes little girls overcommitting to charismatic dysfunctional boys with mental issues, trying to fix them, yes that was very very familiar. But ultimately boring because I'm not sure Eugenides got to anywhere particularly new. I felt like the freshness of Madeleine as a pov character waned as the novel progressed - maybe because the closeness of her feelings and her analysis, which I enjoyed so much at first, pretty much vanished. She's writing on Austen, but I never quite got a sense of her thesis, or of her as a researcher, or of how her identity as a new Austen scholar worked with her identity as a beleaguered new wife. I suppose that what I missed in the novel was writing beyond the end of the marriage plot, which I'm used to in fanwriting. Eugenides didn't stack up to fandom in that respect.



I enjoyed this movie, despite the up-Americanism of its plot - and the concurrent marginalization of Canadian heroism. Ben Affleck looks damn good in a late 70s beard. I always get kind of schadenfreudy when Baffleck does good at things, because Damon gets so much more cred.

Anyway, all the Hollywood stuff is very cute, and there's some great sff culture call-outs - in the action-figure montage at the end I spotted a BSG Classic figurine, which made my night. Also, I would totally watch the hell out of their fake movie.

Worth a watch, for the good pacing and the pretty and the film industry in-jokes. I can't speak to the representation of Iran, as I don't know enough myself, but I have a feeling it's probably less than optimal. This kind of pretty, veneer-of-smart pop-political stuff is rarely what it ought to be, history-wise.