'Matrimony' asks: Is it harder to write or to wed?

Call it the marriage penalty. But this one doesn't come courtesy of the Internal Revenue Service.

It is a truism universally acknowledged that nothing kills off a fictional romance faster than marriage. Even Jane Austen faded to black after her heroines were safely hitched – there were no scenes of Elizabeth and Darcy arguing about the bills or whose turn it was to pick up little Fitzwilliam Jr. from preschool.

Married couples tend to be either comically miserable or frankly at war, a la James Thurber or Edward Albee, or they're parents, and the mess they're making of that job is the focus of the novel. Or, they're the token married couple who squabble cutely in the corner, away from the action.

Enter Joshua Henkin, whose quiet, thoughtful novel Matrimony takes a serious look at the "ties that bind and gag," as Erma Bombeck put it. Julian Wainwright and Mia Mendelsohn meet in college and end up getting married their senior year, after Mia's mom is diagnosed with a terminal illness. The book follows the couple over 20 years – chronicling their insecurities, betrayals, and griefs, while including the leavening faith that allows two people to commit, and recommit, to each other. Henkin makes things harder for himself by creating characters with lives of privilege, but he credibly shows that money and education can't absolve anyone from pain.

While its title and plot focus on a union of hearts, "Matrimony" actually struck me as being almost as much about writing. About two-thirds of the way through "Matrimony," Julian utters what could be considered the war cry of the novel (if it weren't too well-mannered to shout), as he prepares to have yet another story shredded by his colleagues at the Iowa Writer's Workshop: "The story was quiet; all his work was. Perhaps it was a matter of differing aesthetics. There had emerged in American fiction a strain of excess, he believed, a group of knowing authors whose every sentence seemed to shout, 'Look how smart I am.' He had nothing against muscular prose; it was the flexing of those muscles that he objected to, and, along with it, a disregard for character, which, for him, was what fiction was about."

This paragraph alone is enough to endear Henkin to a reader (or, at least, to this reader). We're told that Julian's hero is short-story writer John Cheever; one suspects he is Henkin's as well.

In addition to Mia, Julian finds the other great friend of his life at college. He and Carter Heinz meet in the writing class of Professor Stephen Chesterfield. Actually, it's called the Fiction Writing Workshop, but "Professor Chesterfield hated the word 'workshop,' which sounded like a church meeting, hated it, especially, as a verb ('Will my story be workshopped next time, Professor Chesterfield?'), the use of which was grounds of expulsion from his class." He promptly declares their writing sophomoric and pusillanimous, respectively, and says they're the only two students with any talent at all.

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