An oft-quoted work in the novel, particularly by Madeleine, is Roland's Barthes' seminal work "." 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”. "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. As noted above, the novel was generally well received by critics. 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 modern female character whose "relationships [with almost all other women] are characterized more by spite than affection". Barkhorn noted that the book is not unique in this manner, making reference to The Bechdel Test and stating that "The Marriage Plot" was a prime example of the storytelling trend the Test criticizes: "[t]here are countless other Madeleines in modern-day literature and film: smart, self-assured women who have all the trappings of contemporary womanhood except a group of friends to confide in". Barkhorn also compared the book to the early female authors of the literary genre that Eugenides references in both the novel and its title, opining that writers such as Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen, in depicting close homosocial relationships among women, were more psychologically accurate than Eugenides. She suggested that Madeleine's lack of such relationships was implausible in context ("If this were the way women really acted with their friends, it would be fine.