It’s the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, a dutiful English student and incurable romantic, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, authors of the great marriage plots . As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes.
Leonard Bankhead – brilliant scientist and charismatic loner – turns up in a seminar, and Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. Meanwhile, her old friend Mitchell Grammaticus – a theology student searching for some kind of truth in life - becomes obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate.
But as all three leave college, they will have to figure out how they want their own marriage plot to end.
