The Marriage Plot

Brown University, Rhode Island, 1980: in love, in confusion and at college.

Maddy, beautiful, ambitious student of literature and incurable romantic, has long lived under the spell of Austen and Eliot. Now she is under the spell of one Leonard Bankhead.

Leonard, atypical science student and charismatic loner, wants, well, to be brilliant. But he's cursed by a deep streak of melancholia, a sense of the darkness of life. And the harsh modernity of the early 80s offers no relief.

Mitchell, spiritual, guilt-ridden and certain he is destined to be with Maddy (forever), throws himself time and time again against the rocks of her lack of romantic feelings for him.

The way of true love never works out. Except at the end of an English novel,' wrote Anthony Trollope. Well, this isn't exactly an English novel.