Eugenides chose to set the novel at Brown, his alma mater, after choosing not to set it at a fictional college, saying that it would have been "too much trouble for what it was worth". There is some debate as to whether the character Leonard is based on the author David Foster Wallace. Although Eugenides and Wallace were not friends, both were acquainted with Jonathan Franzen. Critics have pointed out that both Leonard and Wallace wear a bandana, have long hair, chew tobacco, study philosophy, and struggled with mental illness. Furthermore, both the character and Wallace had an interest in time and the passage of time and at least some of Leonard's dialogue appears to have been directly lifted from an article about Wallace. Eugenides has denied that the character is based on Wallace and cited two inspirations for the bandana: that the practice was fairly common among his friends at Brown, and that he was basing Leonard off of "Guns N' Roses and heavy metal guys". Literary connections An oft-quoted work in the novel, particularly by Madeleine, is Roland's Barthes' seminal work A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. One scholar notes, "Barthes points out that, “Those who seek the proffering of the word (lyric poets, liars, wanderers) are subjects of Expenditure: they spend the word, as if it were impertinent (base) that it be recovered somewhere” (154). Moreover, “no love is original,” being “born of literature, able to speak only with the help of its worn codes”. Reception Honors and awards The Guardian, Salon, NPR, and The Washington Post considered the novel to be one of the best books of 2011. It also received the 2011 Salon Book Award for Fiction and was featured on the Library Journal Best Books of the Year list. Critical reception The novel was generally well received by critics. W. Deresiewicz wrote, "'The Marriage Plot' is a new departure...intimate in tone and scale.... It’s about what Eugenides’s books are always about, no matter how they differ: the drama of coming of age.... It possesses the texture and pain of lived experience." C. Romano called it "the most entertaining campus novel since Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons." However, reviews of the novel were not without criticism; Eleanor Barkhorn, writing for The Atlantic, praised the heroine Madeleine as "smart" and in many other ways realistic, but nonetheless criticized the novel for its lack of "believability" in depicting a