Books |
Matrimony
Joshua Henkin
By
Published: Jan 01, 2007
Category:
Fiction
It’s hard to imagine a more radical book — a traditional novel.
Characters you care about, even when they make dumb mistakes.
Dialogue that sounds like people could actually say it.
A plot that lacks any twist more amazing than cancer and infidelity.
A version of these novels will always be with us — in publisher’s catalogues, I feel cheated if there’s isn’t at least one book about a family get-together in a remote spot over a weekend when secrets are revealed and wounds are healed.
But this is the real thing, by a real writer.
But how can this be? Julian Wainwright is a rich kid from New York. Mia Mendelsohn’s father is a physicist. They meet, as freshmen, at a Western Massachusetts school that’s modeled on ultra-liberal Hampshire College. She becomes a therapist; he’s a writer who studies at Iowa, the most prestigious of all graduate programs in the craft.
Nothing ordinary about these people.
And yet they are. They see each other on campus, and he’s smitten — “She’s hot by not being hot,” he tells his best friend — but they don’t meet until they’re doing laundry. He doesn’t want to appear unmanly; he slaps his book of Ernest Hemingway stories on top of the fabric softener. They have a pitch-perfect college kid conversation. Soon they’re lovers.
Think back, see if this resonates: “To be nineteen and making love whenever you wished; this, Julian thought, was how a person should live.” So college. As is doing everything together. You’d think they suffocate, but this first love seems like an enduring love — that is, Mia and Julian might be able to ride it all the way to graduation.
And then, in their senior year, Mia’s mother gets breast cancer. And not the kind that goes away with a laser and a kiss of chemo. “Graduation” takes on new meaning — Mia and Julian are suddenly thrust into adulthood. Which is, of course, symbolized by marriage.
The second improbable plot point: You marry someone you met at 18 — what are the odds that lasts? You should not expect a smooth ride, and you don’t get one. But there’s a difference between surprises that come out of character and circumstance and surprises that show up because the novelist has mapped his book out.
I’m not being specific for a reason; what happens is so ordinary. But that’s Henkin’s trick — to write as casual (and as precise) as this:
It was lunchtime, so they went across the street to pick up sandwiches, turkey for Julian, roast beef for Mia, and between bites Julian explained that he’d been reading about supertasters. It was an actual scientific category, he said. Supertasters were different from other people. Their tongues were denser; they had more taste buds.
"Say you like Brussels sprouts," he said.
"I do."
"And I don’t. But when we eat Brussels sprouts, are we eating the same thing and just responding differently, or are our taste buds actually registering something different?"
"Is that a philosophical question?"
"I think so."
But before she could answer him, he had moved from philosophy to English usage. He was listing the idioms he used to get wrong. He’d said "no holes barred "instead of "no holds barred" and "deep-seeded" instead of "deep-seated." "It’s ‘home in on,’" he said, "not ‘hone in on.’ Like a homing pigeon." Why, he wanted to know, was it "the whole nine yards" and not "the whole ten yards"? It took ten yards to get a first down. Or "have your cake and eat it, too." It was no trick, he said, to have your cake and eat it. The real trick was in reverse, to eat your cake and still have it. That was what the idiom should have been: "to eat your cake and have it, too."
"Or ‘long in the tooth.’" Mia said. "What does that mean?"
"Old."
"But why? Do our teeth get longer as we age? Are we destined to become beavers?"
And on into marriage, with its evasions and confrontations, loyalties and betrayals. Two lives, just like yours, except when they aren’t. Two people you care about, even when they screw up.
Joshua Henkin writes slowly: this book, his second, took him a decade. And he has no chart; he started with the idea of a college reunion, and although there is one, it occurs late in the book and lasts only a few pages. His skill is simpler. And so much more difficult: “To bring to life complex, believable characters. If the characters don’t jump off the page, the greatest story in the world isn’t worth anything, nor is the prettiest sentence.”
Not the greatest story. Not the prettiest sentences. Just old-fashioned, credible characters. What a relief.
To buy “Matrimony” from Amazon.com, click here.
For Joshua Henkin’s web site, click here.
