I started reading The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides over the weekend, but abandoned it after about 120 pages. I just couldn’t connect with the characters, who felt two-dimensional, their dialogue unrealistic and forced. And the story felt slow and leaden. I was disappointed, as I’ve loved Eugenides’ previous novels. But it did get me thinking about novels about marriage, so here’s a book list full of suggestions from twitter of fiction on the subject.
Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Mr and Mrs Bridge by Evan S Connell
One Fine Day by Mollie Panter Downs
The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Notes From an Exhibition by Patrick Gale
We Had It So Good by Linda S Grant
The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Tortoise and the Hare by Elizabeth Jenkins
The Tiny Wife by Andrew Kaufman
Diary of a Mad Housewife by Sue Kaufman
Rose Madder and Gerald’s Game by Stephen King
Comfort & Joy by India Knight
War Between the Tates by Alison Lurie
Greenery Street by Dennis Mackail
Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
American Pastoral by Phillip Roth
Happenstance by Carol Shields
Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee by Meera Syal
The Adultery Club by Tess Stimson
Anna Karenina by L.N. Tolstoy
The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler
Couples and Roger’s Version and the Rabbit novels by John Updike
The Wife by Meg Wolitzer
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
