HardCover. Pub Date :2011-10-11 416 English Fourth Estate It's the early 1980s.In American colleges. the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads.But Madeleine Hanna. dutiful English major . is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot. purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels.As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart. real life. in the form of two very different guys. intervenes.Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner and college Darwinist - suddenly turns up in a seminar. and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him.At the same time. her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus - who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces. obsessed with the idea that Madeleine i...