"I was walking with my girlfriend when we saw him. Shirtless, in late-afternoon sunlight, J.F.K., Jr., was playing Frisbee, wearing nothing but black athletic shorts..."

"... tennis shoes, and droopy white socks. This was the Ivy League. Nobody worked out. (Nobody I knew, anyway.) And so I wasn’t prepared for the muscularity, the anachronistic virility, on display. John’s physique was so classically ideal he might’ve been throwing a discus instead of a Frisbee and been carved out of stone. You looked for the defect in him and you couldn’t find it. There had to be something wrong somewhere, but it would take a magnifying glass to detect. Most of his clan had inherited the freckled, rabbity Kennedy looks. John, lucky in everything, had received the enhancing admixture of dark, French Mediterranean, Bouvier blood. I mentioned it was 1979. Bisexuality was undergoing one of its periodic upticks. I’d fallen into some confusion on that score myself. But I had a girlfriend now. That wasn’t what was going on. The urge I felt wasn’t to possess. It wasn’t even to resemble. It was to draw near. To be allowed to draw near...."

Writes Jeffrey Eugenides, in "My Unrequited Love Story with J.F.K., Jr./I knew John F. Kennedy, Jr., not that well and not that long, but enough to have experienced the gravitational pull he exerted, like some great big moon"
 (The New Yorker).

"In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had a subject to write about."

"The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter whom Emma [Bovary] married if she could file for separation later?"

Says a character in the Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel "The Marriage Plot," reviewed here.

Eugenides, speaking for himself, made a virtually identical argument in Slate several years ago, substituting “Anna Karenina” for “Madame Bovary”: “You can’t have your heroine throw herself under a train because she left her husband and ruined her life. Now your heroine would just have a custody battle and remarry.”

Oh, yeah? And what about cell phones? They're wreaking havoc on hack plots. Of course, the answer is to throw in some bit about how there's no signal or the battery is dead.

There must be a stock list of reasons why a modern-day woman cannot divorce. 1. Make her religious, 2. Inheritance, 3. Children, 4. Husband gives access to some needed social or business network, 5. Hey, I'm not a writer of plots! You figure it out, writer man.