Synopses & Reviews
It's the fall of 1986, and Julian Wainwright, an aspiring writer, arrives at Graymont College in New England. Here he meets Carter Heinz, with whom he develops a strong but ambivalent friendship, and beautiful Mia Mendelsohn, with whom he falls in love. Spurred on by a family tragedy, Julian and Mia's love affair will carry them to graduation and beyond, taking them through several college towns, over the next fifteen years.
Starting at the height of the Reagan era and ending in the new millennium, Matrimony is a stunning novel of love and friendship, money and ambition, desire and tensions of faith. It is a richly 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.
Review
"In the tradition of John Cheever and Richard Yates, Joshua Henkin has written a devastating novel about love, hope, delusion, and the intricate ways in which time's passage raises us up even as it grinds us down. It's a beautiful book. Here's to its brilliant future." Michael Cunningham, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours
Review
"In this classically composed second novel of a couple who meet and fall in love at their liberal arts college in the Berkshires, Henkin...sensitively examines the 15 years of love and marriage that follow." The Philadelphia Inquirer
Review
"[A]n appealing story of romance, wedlock, personal and spousal conflict and growth....Ragged, but it gets to you and stays with you. Expect even better things from Henkin in the future." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"While not earthshakingly original, this novel takes a good look at love, friendship, and marriage from the Reagan years to the new century. Recommended." Library Journal
Review
"With vibrant intelligence, Matrimony looks at the mystery of how a couple stays together and the ways even the most privileged among us are subject to the disasters wrought by our incalculable natures. A luminous tale, eloquently told." Joan Silber, author of Lucky Us
Review
"[Henkin] is able to explore in depth a surprisingly wide array of issues universal to the experiences of marriage. . . . It is a testament to Matrimony's redemptive power that at the end of the novel, despite all of the difficulties the characters face, the reader might still want to get, or stay, married." Adam Goldwyn, Small Spiral Notebook
Review
"Mr. Henkin writes with a winningly anachronistic absence of showiness....
This is just a lifelike, likable book populated by three-dimensional
characters who make themselves very much at home on the page." Janet Maslin, New York Times
Review
"[A] charming novel ... Henkin keeps you reading with original characters,
witty dialogue and a view that marriage, for all its flaws, is worth the
trouble." Tom Fields-Meyer, People
Review
"Henkin is a master of scenemaking, and each scene reveals enough of his story that we must go on to the next scene, to see what consequence it has." The Chicago Tribune
Synopsis
In its emotional honesty, its luminous prose, and wry wit, Matrimony is a beautifully detailed portrait of what it means to share a life with someone — to do so when young, and to try to do it afresh on the brink of middle age.
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About the Author
Joshua Henkin is the author of the novel Swimming Across the Hudson (1997), which was named a Los Angeles Times Notable Book of the Year. His short stories have been published in Ploughshares, The Southern Review, The Yale Review, Triquarterly, DoubleTake, Glimmer Train, The North American Review, and elsewhere. His fiction has been performed at Symphony Space and broadcast on NPR's "Selected Shorts" as well as cited for distinction in Best American Short Stories. He is the recipient of the Playboy Fiction Prize, 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 Nation, Mother Jones, and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches in the creative writing programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College.
Reading Group Guide
“Charming. . . . Henkin keeps you reading with original characters, witty dialogue, and a view that marriage, for all its flaws, is worth the trouble.”
—People
The introduction, questions, and suggestions for further reading that follow are designed to stimulate your group's discussion of Joshua Henkin's Matrimony.