By JENNIFER EGAN
Published: October 28, 2007
The early pages of “Matrimony,” Joshua Henkin’s second novel, call to mind an academic trick employed by Carter Heinz, one of the main characters: “He had started to write what he called beyond-the-scope-of-this-paper papers, in which he would begin by listing all of the things he wasn’t going to write about.” “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. Carter soon acquires a girlfriend, Pilar. At the end of an evening with the couple, Julian notes their obvious desire to escape his company. “There were repeated glances at watches ... an astonishing assortment of signals and tics, a kind of lovers’ Morse code. ... Was the sex really that good?” To Julian’s bewilderment, it turns out sex wasn’t the lure at all; it was “Nightline.” “When did you become so domestic?” he marvels at Carter. “What’s wrong with domestic?” Carter counters.
That question serves as a cri de coeur in “Matrimony.” Deepening a trend toward domesticity in American fiction by men, Henkin takes it up as his explicit subject: the ease with which we mammals fall into domestic arrangements; the very different meanings domesticity has for college couples shambling from bed to class and for adult partners grappling with larger life issues; the ways in which domesticity inevitably leads us back to our own parental ties. Where coming-of-age novels tend to wave goodbye as their protagonists sally over the threshold to adulthood, Henkin hangs in long after that, tracking his characters for almost 20 years, into their mid-30s, when the weight of their adulthood can be truly felt. It’s a coming-of-middle-age novel.
At the center of “Matrimony” are Julian and his girlfriend, Mia, who meet in a dormitory laundry room not long after Carter and Pilar are paired. They, too, fall easily into a domestic routine, and by senior year the two couples are cohabiting in a large house, eating chips, soaking in a hot tub and bantering about the future. Henkin’s prose is often arresting (Pilar, he writes, had “a high-alert face”), but its real power is tapped when Mia’s mother begins a losing battle with breast cancer, yanking Mia out of the easy flow of campus life. Henkin portrays Mia’s time with her dying mother in effortless scenes that float between past and present and are as painful to read as any I can recall on this subject, bringing to mind Jayne Anne Phillips’s classic short story, “Home.”
“In her bra and underwear,” Henkin writes, “Mia stood behind her mother while she showered, hands pressed against her mother’s shoulder blades. She closed her eyes and soaped her mother’s back and arms, thinking her mother had lost weight, praying that this was the last of it, that after the chemotherapy and radiation the cancer would be gone. ‘Are you O.K., Mom? Is the water too hot?’ But her mother was too weak to answer.”
Afterward, Mia tells her mother, “ ‘I don’t want to go back to school.’
“ ‘It’s vacation, sweetie.’
“ ‘I mean ever. I’m going to spend all my time with you.’
“ ‘I’ll be asleep a lot,” her mother said. ‘What will you do then?’
“ ‘I’ll watch you.’ Mia folded back her mother’s sheets. ‘You used to watch me sleep, didn’t you, Mom? When I was a baby?’ ”
By observing the routines of Julian and Mia’s shared life during the crisis, Henkin renders the intensity of their bond without once approaching melodrama. Julian shops with Mia and her mother for a wig; attends classes with Mia so she won’t wander, grief-addled, through the campus streets; and agrees to marry her in their senior year so Mia’s mother can be present at their wedding. When we next encounter the couple, four years later, Julian has accompanied Mia to Ann Arbor while she pursues a Ph.D. in psychology. But when he later learns, on a trip to California to visit Carter (now a dot-com millionaire), that Mia betrayed him years before, Julian leaves her swiftly and almost without discussion — a move that is all the more shattering for the lack of sturm and drang attending it.
Julian’s goal is to write a novel, and “Matrimony” is both the story of that novel’s making and its product. Great novels (beginning with “Tristram Shandy”) have been written about their own creation, but the novel-writing part of “Matrimony” is its weakest. For all Henkin’s ingenuity at bringing commitment, love and other potentially numbing topics freshly to life, he fails to animate Julian’s writing struggles above the familiar. We’re left with observations like “sure, he’d had two stories accepted at Harper’s, but he hadn’t been able to get back to his novel, which was why he had come to Iowa in the first place” and a meditation on the neglected importance of character in contemporary fiction that reads less like the play of a burgeoning writer’s thoughts than like an author telegraphing his readers: “There had emerged in American fiction a strain of excess, he believed, a group of knowing authors whose every sentence
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