July 2012
Photo © Matthew Polis.
Joshua Henkin is the author of the novels Matrimiony, a New York Times Notable Book, and Swimming Across the Hudson, a Los Angeles Times Notable Book. His new novel, The World Without You, has just been published by Pantheon. His short stories have been published widely, cited for distinction in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES, and broadcast on NPR's "Selected Shorts." He lives in Brooklyn, NY, and directs the MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College.
"Point this one out to contemporary fiction fans of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, or the works of Rick Moody, Richard Russo, Philip Roth, and John Updike."
—Library Journal
"The author has created an empathetic cast of characters that the reader will love spending time with, even as they behave like fools and hurt one another. An intelligently written novel that works as a summer read and for any other time of the year."
—Publishers Weekly, ***Starred Review***
"When conventionalists claim, 'They don’t write novels like that anymore,' this is the sort of novel they mean. Yet the very familiarity and durability of the setup suggests that the traditional novel remains very much alive and healthy as well, if the narrative momentum and depth of character here are proof of vitality…A novel that satisfies all expectations in some very familiar ways."
—Kirkus Reviews, ***Starred Review***
"Joshua Henkin does a masterful job capturing life and turning it into art. This novel feels very real, and it will leave you thinking and reminiscing long after you turn the last page."
—Goodreads
"I dutifully acknowledge Leo Tolstoy's famous Anna Karenina chestnut about the distinctive qualities of each unhappy family. But I also propose that it's damn difficult to make the basic unhappy-family novel distinctly one's own. Henkin does so with a one-two combination of strengths: psychological empathy for his realistic characters, and an expository modesty that draws attention away from the skilled writing itself — no showy sentences here, no cadenza-like phrasing — in order to focus, with great care, on the subtleties and complications of familial love."
—Entertainment Weekly, ***Lead Review***
The World Without You by
***National Jewish Book Awards 2012, Finalist*** nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp;nbsp; JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction From the author of the New York Times Notable Book Matrimony ["Beautiful . . . Brilliant."--Michael Cunningham], a moving,nbsp;mesmerizing new novel about love, loss, and the aftermath of a family tragedy. It's July 4, 2005, and the Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. But this is no ordinary holiday. The family has gathered to memorialize Leo, the youngest of the four siblings, an intrepid journalist and adventurer who was killed on that day in 2004, while on assignment in Iraq. The parents, Marilyn and David, are adrift in grief. Their forty-year marriage is falling apart. Clarissa, the eldest sibling and a former cello prodigy, has settled into an ambivalent domesticity and is struggling at age thirty-nine to become pregnant. Lily, a fiery-tempered lawyer and the family contrarian, is angry at everyone. And Noelle, whose teenage years were shadowed by promiscuity and school expulsions, has moved to Jerusalem and become a born-again Orthodox Jew. The last person to see Leo alive, Noelle has flown back for the memorial with her husband and four children, but she feels entirely out of place. And Thisbe --Leo's widow and mother of their three-year-old son--has come from California bearing her own secret. Set against the backdrop of Independence Day and the Iraq War, The World Without You is a novel about sibling rivalries and marital feuds, about volatile women and silent men, and, ultimately, about the true meaning of family.
Matrimony by
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 new millennium,Matrimonyis 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,Matrimonyis 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 Hardcover edition.
Swimming Across the Hudson by
As a child, Ben Suskind wonders how his family came together. What if he hadn't been adopted by Jews, what if his brother, Jonathan, had been adopted by a different couple? He and Jonathan fantasize about being the secret sons of Sandy Koufax, of coming to earth in a spaceship. They make blood pacts and switch names. But while they imagine other identities, they search for ways to feel that they belong to each other, to their parents, to their home. As adolescents, even in the familiar and happy comfort of the Manhattan apartment where they live, their dreams of girls and rock stars are colored by these concerns." "Now Ben Suskind is thirty years old, living in San Francisco with his girlfriend, Jenny, and her daughter. He still reflects on the questions of his youth; Jenny often has to pull his head out of the clouds. So when he receives a letter from a woman claiming to be his birth mother, he is unprepared, panicked, but curious. He tells his adoptive parents about the letter, and they fly him home to New York and reveal a secret about his past, one that turns Ben's whole world upside down." "Without telling anyone, Ben embarks on a journey, risking his relationship with everyone - his girlfriend, his brother, his parents. He combs through the records of his family's past, trying to find the facts about who he and Jonathan really are, and in the process learns the price of the lies people tell in the name of truth and good intentions.
