Sorry, I was disappointed. After the author’s wonderful Middlesex, I expected more of him than a book that mashes together a novel of academia, high-level chick lit, and homage to Salinger’s religiously troubled Franny from Franny and Zooey. I didn’t think I was ever going to run across the Jesus Prayer again. It’s the 1980s at Brown University. Well-bred Madeleine Hanna, who is enchanted by Jane Austen and Victorian literature, novels where “the marriage plot” drives the action, stumbles into a semiotics seminar where she has her eyes opened to a different world. And to Leonard Bankhead, poor and brilliant –perhaps her Heathcliff. Competing for her affections, ineptly, is Mitchell Grammaticus, who has begun exploring the Christian mystics. This triangle bumps along through their college years (angst, drinking binges, sex….) until on the eve of graduation Leonard has a breakdown, revealing a terrible secret he has been keeping. Then it’s off to India for Mitchell to continue his spiritual explorations and dabble briefly with working for Mother Teresa. Meanwhile, Leonard and Madeleine try to work things out at a rarefied biology laboratory on Cape Cod. Former English majors may enjoy the opening chapters more than those with less interest in The New Criticism and Deconstructionism. I found Madeleine somewhat undeserving of the attentions from either of her disturbed suitors. 406 pp.
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