Joshua Henkin’s ‘Matrimony,’ a Novel About the Rewards and Perils of Marrying Young

Two male best friends get an education in love that begins in college and continues until their 15th-year reunion

Matrimony. By Joshua Henkin. Pantheon, 291 pp., $23.95.

By Janice Harayda

There’s a delicious scene early in Matrimony in which an English professor tries to curb the influence of Hollywood on his students’ writing partly by forbidding them to use the word “kerplunk” in their short stories. It’s blisteringly funny, and its deft blend of comedy and pathos reminds you of Dan Wakefield’s fine early novels, Going All the Way and Starting Over.

But the tone of Matrimony shifts as Joshua Henkin follows two of the professor’s students from college to early middle age. Best friends Julian Wainwright and Carter Heinz meet their future wives as freshmen and marry younger than many of their peers. And before they return to college for their 15th-year reunion, the bristling satire of the first chapter has given way at times to high-class soap opera. A $17-million dot-com windfall enriches a character nobody saw as the next Steve Jobs. A test for the breast-cancer gene leads another to consider having a double mastectomy immediately. Novels that lay unfinished for years suddenly get completed.

Fortunately, Henkin is too thoughtful a writer to allow his story to become silly, and amid all the improbable events, Matrimony offers sharp social commentary. In his 30s, Julian visits Carter in San Francisco and assumes incorrectly that he has less attachment to his car than other Californians. “I’m like everyone else,” Carter corrects him. “I take the elevator to the third floor so I can work out on the StairMaster.”

Best line: “Destroyed by Hollywood, Professor Chesterfield returned to Graymont, to his students, who watched more and more movies and read fewer and fewer books. Scrutinizing their stories, he could see the camera panning, the jump cuts and dolly shots, all the things that had ruined him. Worse, his students had taken to writing words such as ‘bang,’ ‘pop,’ and ‘splat,’ as well as nonwords masquerading as words, such as ‘kaboom,’ ‘yikes,’ ‘glunk,’ and even ‘arrrghhhh,’ often followed by multiple exclamation points. And in case the reader didn’t understand, the student would use capital letters: ‘ARRRGHHHH!!!!!’

“Worst of all was ‘kerplunk,’ which a student of Professor Chesterfield’s had used the previous year. A character had fallen off his horse, and then, in a paragraph all its own, came the single word,

“‘Kerplunk.’”

Worst line: Henkin has a distracting verbal tic: He often joins independent clauses by using “for” instead of “because.” “He liked going to parties, but once he and Mia were actually at one it was she who had the better time, for she was more adept at small talk than he was.” This stilted phrasing clashes with the writing elsewhere in Matrimony, which is more conversational.

Editor: Lexy Bloom

Published: October 2007 www.joshuahenkin.com

Furthermore: Henkin also wrote Swimming Across the Hudson. He lives in New York City.

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

www.janiceharayda.com