Matrimony (Henkin)

Matrimony
Joshua Henkin, 2007
Knopf Doubleday
304 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307277169

Summary
From the moment he was born, Julian Wainwright has lived a life of Waspy privilege. The son of a Yale-educated investment banker, he grew up in a huge apartment on Sutton Place, high above the East River, and attended a tony Manhattan private school. Yet, more than anything, he wants to get out—out from under his parents’ influence, off to Graymont College, in western Massachusetts, where he hopes to become a writer.

When he arrives, in the fall of 1986, Julian meets Carter Heinz, a scholarship student from California with whom he develops a strong but ambivalent friendship. Carter’s mother, desperate to save money for his college education, used to buy him reversible clothing, figuring she was getting two items for the price of one. Now, spending time with Julian, Carter seethes with resentment. He swears he will grow up to be wealthy—wealthier, even, than Julian himself.

Then, one day, flipping through the college facebook, Julian and Carter see a photo of Mia Mendelsohn. Mia from Montreal, they call her. Beautiful, Jewish, the daughter of a physics professor at McGill, Mia is—Julian and Carter agree—dreamy, urbane, stylish, refined.

But Julian gets to Mia first, meeting her by chance in the college laundry room. Soon they begin a love affair that—spurred on by family tragedy—will carry them to graduation and beyond, taking them through several college towns, over the next ten years. Then Carter reappears, working for an Internet company in California, and he throws everyone’s life into turmoil: Julian’s, Mia’s, his own.

Starting at the height of the Reagan era and ending in the newmillennium, Matrimony is about love and friendship, about money and ambition, desire and tensions of faith. It asks what happens to a marriage when it is confronted by betrayal and the specter of mortality. What happens when people marry younger than they’d expected? Can love endure the passing of time?

In its emotional honesty, its luminous prose, its generosity and wry wit, Matrimony is a beautifully detailed portrait of what it means to share a life with someone—to do it when you’re young, and to try to do it afresh on the brink of middle age. (From the publisher.

---

Author Bio
• Birth—March 7, 1964
• Where—New York City
• Education—B.A., Harvard; M.F.A., University of Michigan
• Awards—James Fellowship for the Novel; Hopwood Award,
   PEN Syndicated Fiction Award; Edward Lewis Wallant Award.
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York

Joshua Henkin is the author of Swimming Across the Hudson (1997), which was selected by the Los Angeles Times as a notable book of the year; Matrimony (2007), a New York Times Nobtable Book of the Year; and The World Without You (2012), which has received wide critical acclaim. His short stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in many journals and newspapers. He has taught at Sarah Lawrence College, the 92nd St. Y in New York City, and curently directs the MFA Program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College. (From the publisher.)

More
His fiction has been performed at Symphony Space and broadcast on NPR's Selected Shorts; published in Spanish translation in Habra Una Vez, an anthology of young North American Writers; anthologized in 110 Stories: New York Writes After September 11; and cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the James Fellowship for the Novel, the Hopwood Award, the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, and a grant from the Michigan Council of the Arts. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, The Nation, Mother Jones, The Christian Science Monitor, and elsewhere. (From the author's website.)

Joshua Henkin also wrote a terrific essay about book clubs that received a lot of attention in the blogosphere. It's worth reading.

---

Book Reviews
Henkin writes wonderful dialogue: it's crisp and funny, especially in the beginning. It's also glib, which I came to see as the degree of his characters' self-absorbtion—the way in which they refuse to share their deep store of emotions. Thus, they neither completely understand nor commit to each other—until the book's end. Don't look for heavy plot or "muscular prose"; as Julian says of his own writing: it's quiet with a regard for character—which makes Matrimony a work to relish.
A LitLovers LitPick (Oct. '08)

Matrimony appears, by turns, to be a campus novel (it begins at Graymont College, a fictional liberal arts school in Massachusetts); a buddy novel (the middle-class Carter forms a friendship with Julian Wainwright, a wealthy New York heir); a writing workshop novel (Carter and Julian meet in one); a meditation on literary influence (the workshop teacher is a cantankerous institution reminiscent of Gordon Lish); and a novel about people writing novels (Carter and Julian both want to, of course). Mercifully, Matrimony is all of these—which is to say it's none of them, really. Its beguiling quality derives largely from the speed with which it accelerates past these shopworn possibilities into something unexpected.... The emotional core of Matrimony lies with Mia, and it gains force as Henkin trips through the years. When Julian and Mia move, reunited, to New York, they must confront that greatest of all spoilers: mortality. And by the time they attend their 15th reunion at Graymont, any reader over 35 is likely to feel an almost personal nostalgia for these characters as we knew them first: brash, hopeful, merely playing at adulthood. If they'd only known.
Jennifer Egan - New York Times Book Review

Mr. Henkin writes with a winningly anachronistic absence of showiness. There are no big themes or symbols in Matrimony. The idea of matrimony is not treated as a metaphor, nor is it burdened with the weight of heightened realism. This is just a lifelike, likable book populated by three-dimensional characters who make themselves very much at home on the page. This style becomes humorous, not to mention heretical, with academia as the story's backdrop.
Janet Maslin - New York Times

In 1987, Manhattan-reared hothouse flower Julian Wainwright matriculates at the alternative Graymont College for the express purposes of attending Professor Stephen Chesterfield's exclusive fiction writing workshop. As Chesterfield dryly infuses his writing wisdom, Julian befriends the cocky, aloof, lesser-born Carter Heinz when they are the only two to whom Chesterfield gives the nod. Carter soon meets Pilar in the cafeteria; Julian meets Mia in the laundry room. Carter's simmering class resentment of Julian surfaces. Senior year finds the two couples living next door to one another and plotting their futures. Henkin (Swimming Across the Hudson) subsequently follows the lovers for the next 15 years through countless college towns, family dramas, failed literary projects and the dot-com boom. Many scenes are too long, and never get below the surface of the cast, particularly wannabe-litterateur Julian. But for a book called Matrimony, Henkin offers surprisingly little about Julian and Mia's marriage, so when big confrontations do arrive, they quickly slide into melodrama. By then, lines like "But I don't want to get my M.F.A. Can't you understand that? I've already been in enough writing workshops" will have cleared the classroom.
Publishers Weekly

Julian Wainwright is the WASPy son of Yalie Richard Wainwright III and Constance Wainwright, a Wellesley graduate. He loves his parents and doesn't mind being rich, but he is ready to escape. So in 1986 he heads off to Graymont College, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, where he can pursue his writing and leave his heritage behind for awhile. During the course of the year, he meets the lovely Mia Mendelsohn while doing laundry. They are both smitten and begin a love affair that lasts 20 years. Of course, it isn't without its ups and downs. Mia loses her mother to breast cancer her senior year and hangs onto the life she knows by marrying Julian. They then head to Michigan, where she will attend graduate school and he will work on his novel. Best friend Carter Heinz figures prominently in Julian's life, and it's while visiting Carter in California that Julian learns a secret that threatens to tear his life apart. While not earthshakingly original, this novel takes a good look at love, friendship, and marriage from the Reagan years to the new century.
Robin Nesbitt - Library Journal

The second novel from the Brooklyn-based author of Swimming Across the Hudson (1997) is an appealing story of romance, wedlock, personal and spousal conflict and growth. Its principals are handsome, idealistic Julian Wainwright, son of a wealthy New York investment banker, and beautiful Mia Mendelsohn ("Mia of Montreal"). They meet in 1987 at Graymont College in western Massachusetts, a bastion of progressive and permissive liberalism. The two fall quickly and decisively in love, and marry hastily, while Mia's beloved mother, stricken with breast cancer, is still alive to attend their wedding. Thereafter, they part, hesitantly reunite, then eventually accept that they belong together, as Julian pursues his lifelong dream of writing serious literary fiction and Mia becomes a Manhattan psychotherapist-and they finally produce the child they had put off conceiving for more than 15 years. The novel is best in its early pages, set during their Graymont years; studded with eccentric details and moments that recall Julian's favorite author, John Cheever (e.g., the manner in which Julian drifts into becoming a walker of other people's dogs). Julian's college roommate Carter Heinz, a pugnacious Californian who postures like a lower-middle-class Oscar Wilde, has some good moments, as does irascible Professor Chesterfield, their fiction-writing teacher. In fact, the pages devoted to Mia's and Julian's young adulthood radiate the kind of offbeat shoulder-shrugging charm that made Michael Chabon's The Mysteries of Pittsburgh so memorable. But the book slows to a crawl as each of its several major relationships becomes freighted with complications that are analyzed in lengthy explanatory conversations. Henkin recovers just in time, though, as Mia and Julian face together trials that neither can handle alone and achieve a conventional happy ending that does strike the relieved reader as the logical consequence of the depth of their mutual feelings. Ragged, but it gets to you and stays with you. Expect even better things from Henkin in the future.
Kirkus Reviews

---

Discussion Questions

1. Discuss the parent-child relationships in the novel. How much are the lives of Julian, Mia and Carter a rejection of their parents’ lives? Despite how much they try to get away from the patterns of their parents, are they successful? Also consider Professor Chesterfield as a replacement father figure for Julian. What role does genetics play in the parent-child relationships?

2. In a book about a writer, what effect does the autobiographical component have on the story? Julian's desire to be a writer is a catalyst that drives the narrative. What does the novel say about the writer's life?

3. As Julian tried to comfort Mia when her mother was sick, Mia "felt her heart beat against him like something caged in, wings batting, slapping against themselves."What does this say about their relationship, and how is it reflected in their marriage?

4. Discuss the marriage of Julian and Mia. How do they complement each other (or not)?

5. How much is Julian’s life ruled by the following idea: "Julian already felt, moments after graduating from college, that he was letting people down"? Consider which of Julian's decisions are either passive or made in order to please others.

6. Consider the following two quotations about Mia: "She felt suddenly that they weren't her friends, that despite all the time they’d spent together, they'd never really cared about her." "She felt desperate for him to know her better, felt a conviction that despite having been with her for three years, he didn’t apprehend her at all."Are Mia's fears rational, or justified?

7. Mia and Julian were prompted to get married because of her mom’s cancer, and then Mia's own cancer scare seems to push them into the decision to have children. Is this a good way to run a marriage? What is Henkin telling us about adult decisions and consequences?

8. Examine the trajectory of Carter and Pilar's relationship. What does it say about them?

9. Discuss the relationship between Carter and Julian. What does each of them bring to the friendship, and how do they affect each other's lives? Discuss the relationship between Mia and Pilar. In what ways are both of these relationships competitive? How are they each rivals?

10. The novel is structured around place. What is the significance of the college town? How do the different locales affect the couples?

11. How does the stress of choosing schooling and careers affect these couples?

12. Issues of money come up between both of the couples. What does the novel tell us about the role of money in marriages and in society? What role does class play in the characters' relationships and careers?

13. At the end of the novel, Julian forgives Carter. Do you agree with his decision?

14. Compare and contrast all of the couples in the novel (married and not). In total, what does the novel tell us about matrimony?

15. Novels about relationships are usually the terrain of women, but Matrimony is written by a man. How much does the gender of the author influence the narrative?

16. What is the role or importance of religion with these couples? Mia is Jewish but only seems to grasp at it during crucial times.

17. How does divorce play into the novel? Do you think it’s traumatic for children no matter what age they are?

18. Discuss the infidelities in the novel. What role does betrayal play with these characters and in their marriages/relationships?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

top of page