Class Is Not Dismissed

By RACHEL SOMERSTEIN

Matrimony
By Joshua Henkin
304 pages. Pantheon. $24.95.

This article has been published as part of a partnership between JBooks.com and InterfaithFamily.com. Visit InterfaithFamily.com for more articles on interfaith literature.

Writing last May in The Nation, William Deresiewicz described the tendency of young Jewish fiction writers to avoid speaking of their own—that is, contemporary—experience. As examples, he cited Jonathan Safran Foer, Michael Chabon, and Nathan Englander, all of whom are using their writing to reach back to places as far-ranging as the 18^th century in what is now Ukraine, and 1970s Argentina. These writers appear to avoid contemporary Jewish experience, he writes, “because their own experience just seems too boring. What is there to say about it? Better to write about a time or place where there was more at stake.” Matrimony, the new novel by Joshua Henkin, confirms and denies Deresiewicz’s contention: by writing this novel, Henkin shows that the contemporary Jewish condition—as defined by the pursuit of knowledge, dependence on Jewish ritual during times of crisis, and the experience and specter of breast cancer—is important enough to be written about. But the book also begs Deresiewicz’s question: What’s at stake?

Matrimony opens at Graymont College, a small liberal arts school in western Massachusetts. We meet Julian, who’s a WASP, and Mia, who’s Jewish, and follow them from freshman year through graduate school and beyond. Mia spends a decade(!) on her dissertation. Julian is perpetually writing a novel—for about 15 years. The thought of having a family keeps getting pushed aside, even once the two have hit their 30s. It takes an infidelity to propel them from their purgatory of a life.

Interestingly, Judaism does not color their relationship, even though religion remains a given for Mia, who sits shiva for her mother, for instance. The argument that people ought to stick to their own kind is left to Carter, Julian’s best friend from college, to declaim. But over the course of the book, straying from one’s own kind seems to have more ramifications for those with economic, rather than religious, differences. That a religious conflict doesn’t flare up shows that for Henkin, the answer of what’s at stake is not intermarriage, Jewish identity, or a struggle for or against assimilation and acceptance. These questions, as Deresiewicz pointed out, are no longer relevant. What’s at stake here seems to have to do with upper-middle-class ennui; the inability, in spite of intelligence and privilege, to finish a long-term project; and one couple’s battered-but-enduring love. These issues result in a similar kind of questing and restlessness experienced by overtly Jewish-American characters in books by, say, Philip Roth. What’s interesting is that relationship drama and the discomfort caused by class differences is traditionally the stuff of WASP writers like John Updike, Paula Fox, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Henkin does a good job of showing the ‘what’ of Mia and Julian’s relationship, as the balance of power between the two shifts according to each one’s successes and failures. But the writer is not nearly so adept at showing the ‘why.’ Perhaps that’s due to his rather quiet writerly tendencies. Reconciliations take place so quickly that a six-year estrangement between friends, for instance, is dispatched within a few pages. Mia, in particular, manages difficult subjects without much depth, relying heavily on pleasantries and saying, “Oh, Julian.” Because the events that Henkin sketches lack a sufficient dramatic pitch, they seem not to matter deeply. Henkin also avoids scenes that are by nature high drama, such as weddings, funerals, and births. As a result, one is left without satisfactory answers to the big questions: What is so paralyzing about privilege? Why do people forgive each other? And why do they get so mad in the first place? Allowing the characters to get a bit messy would have revealed more about their personalities, motivations, and inner lives.

Perhaps Henkin is aiming to cut too wide a swath, a symptom of his choice of omniscient third-person point of view. We know all the characters’ thoughts, but unfortunately, we don’t ever really get to know any of them too well. (It is worth noting that third-person omniscient perspective also seems somehow religious; for who besides God knows what everybody’s thinking?) Probing the human condition—why do people do the things they do?—is the hallmark of any successful fiction, in which anybody, from Jewish-American bourgeois professionals to the long-lost inhabitants of the shtetl, takes part.

Henkin does a better job describing a writer’s mental life and the way that career, particularly in its early stages, influences close relationships. From his descriptions of undergraduate creative writing workshops to the deals that Julian makes with himself (that he won’t start a family until he’s finished his novel, for instance), these moments strike what is perhaps the book’s most authentic note. Henkin also seems to be having the most fun with this part of the book. For example, the rules sketched out by Prof. Chesterfield, Julian’s writing professor at Graymont, are humorous and delightful to read. For instance, “THOU SHALT NOT UTTER THE PHRASE ‘SHOW, DON'T TELL’ WHEN DISCUSSING ONE ANOTHER’S SHORT STORIES” and “THOU SHALT POPULATE YOUR STORIES WITH HOMO SAPIENS.”

On a deeper level, Julian’s ambivalence toward writing—he spins around it in a perpetual orbit of desire and avoidance—can be read as a metaphor for his relationship with Mia. Writing also serves as a flash point for the couple, which Henkin captures well. Mia doesn’t want to read Julian’s work, for fear that it’s good or bad. This terrain strikes me as a stand-in for religion, about which the couple does not wrangle. Like stories involving intermarriage or tales of cultural clashes, here one character has something that the other lacks, cannot fully understand, and hesitates to approach. As a result, a sort of low-level tension hums throughout the book. So perhaps it is to books like these, which do not deal overtly with the contemporary Jewish-American condition, that Deresiewicz might cast his glance. In Judaism’s absence, what takes its place?