Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.

"It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to the 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--the charismatic and intense Leonard Bankhead, and her old friend the mystically inclined Mithcell Grammaticus. As all three of them face life in the rela world, they will have to reevaluate everything they have learned"--Page 4 of cover.