It`s the early 1980s, In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. Bur Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Ausfen 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 suitors, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner and college Darwinist - turns up in a seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged 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 is destined to be his wife. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle graduate from college and enter the real world, they will be forced to re-evaluate everything. Are the great love stories of