First Quarter of the Marriage Plot

In the first hundred or so pages of The Marriage Plot, I am seeing themes of  identity formation, meaning (obviously with all the semiotics talk, but also through the action of the people), and how we make meaning out of ourselves and others through a complex interchange of social and personal constellations.  Madeline is busily trying to define herself in a time when the definition of who she can be is changing.  She is reacting against the norms of her parents expectations, her own expectations, the tropes inbued in the nineteenth century novels she reads, the semiotics class she is a part of, and her attempts to rationalize falling in love through the writing of Barthes.  Much of her identity and the identity of the other characters is wrapped up in the tropes of literature.  Both overtly stated in the book, but additionally in the almost stereotypical literary stock figure descriptions that the author uses as he is writing the Marriage Plot.  ( I suppose you could say this is post-modern in the sense that he is “ironically” using cliché to make his overall point come out.  Look I am a writer who is writing a story about meaning and language and how it is stereotypical and I am using language and stereotypes to make my point.  I am so clever. And he is clever, but not in a tiresome way)  None of the characters seem to have any agency of their own, but are all driven by the interpretations they are given and then they act within those parameters. Even the ones who think they outside looking in like Thurston. This is not to say I don’t like the book, because I am enjoying it greatly.  I read the first quarter of the book Wednesday afternoon, enjoying all of it; I only stopped because I had a meeting to attend.  I like the interplay of the narrative and the themes I am seeing so far; he uses the mechanics of storytelling to make his points without becoming mechanical.  

I look forward to watching it unfold (or should I say unpack itself, to be "deconstructive").