Eugenides’ Page Six Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides’ latest novel, The Marriage Plot, will be published early next week. Now normally, that would have me thinking about the details of plot and the delicious treat the book is likely to provide: an unlikely ivory tower romance that Kirkus called “A stunning novel -- erudite, compassionate and penetrating in its analysis of love relationships” and Booklist said it was an “extraordinary, liquidly written evocation of love’s mad rush and inevitable failures [that] will feed your mind as you rapidly turn the pages.”

This is Eugenides’ first novel since 2002’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex and the third since his stunning debut, The Virgin Suicides, in 1993, the film on which Sofia Coppola hung her own debut.

So I should be thinking about all of these things. And I am looking forward to reading The Marriage Plot. I have every reason to believe it will be fantastic. Right now, though, all I can think about is the Page Six-documented item from last summer that saw the author allegedly assaulted on a “New Jersey train by a drunken lout allegedly obsessed with his own genitalia.” January reported on that here. (And I’ll bet Eugenides would just prefer we let it go.)