In his new novel, The Marrige Plot: A Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), characters fall in love, marry and quarrel just the way they do in the classic "marriage" novels from Austen to James. But don't we, as readers, have to fall in love with the characters too? Jeffrey Eugenides describes this as the novel in which he learned to "do" character, and he tells what he learned. Eugenides is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex and The Virgin Suicides.
Read an excerpt from The Marriage Plot.