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Courtesy of Pantheon Press |
'Matrimony' asks: Is it harder to write or to wed?
Neither is easy, suggests Joshua Henkin in his thoughtful new novel about a young husband in a writer's workshop
from the December 18, 2007 edition
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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.
Chesterfield is a tour de force immediately recognizable to anyone who's survived a college fiction writing course – right down to the contempt for grades and the deal with Hollywood that went sour. Over the course of the year, he issues 117 commandments on writing that range from "Thou shalt not use the word 'kerplunk' " to "Thou shalt not utter the phrase 'show, don't tell' when discussing one another's short stories." Any student who can correctly use a semicolon gets an automatic A in the class. ("It's been my experience," Professor Chesterfield said, "that the average college student thinks of the semicolon as a very large comma.") I fell in love immediately.
Carter and Mia were a harder sell – Carter, in particular. He and Julian talk about being best friends a lot, but they don't really feel like friends, so when Carter betrays Julian down the road, it elicits barely a shrug from the reader. Julian's essential niceness – he's kind to dogs and immigrant grocers – and his desire to earn his way, help overcome the immediate distrust of those of us, like Carter, who were one student loan away from community college. Plus, Julian's insecurity is immediately familiar to anyone who's ever penned anything longer than a Christmas card. Apparently, he either read too much Hemingway or watched "Auntie Mame" one too many times. "He believed a writer was supposed 'to live,' which in his mind meant 'to do manual labor,' to work on a construction crew or on a fishing boat and get up before dawn to write. The problem was, he didn't have much experience with manual labor and, if he was honest with himself, he wasn't good at it."
While neither takes the muscles of a longshoreman, both writing and marriage qualify as hard work. And it turns out Julian may have more of an aptitude for perseverance than he thinks.
"Matrimony" also dissects the marriages of both Mia's and Julian's parents, Carter and his college girlfriend, and the long-term affair Mia's sister has with a married man. None are played for laughs, but there aren't any rose petals or serenading violins either. The varied shades help round out a portrait of a rather maligned institution, and suggest that Henkin, as well as Julian, took Chesterfield's advice to heart: "Professor Chesterfield used to say that everyone at college either writes what they know, which is a transcript of Friday night's keg party, or what they don't know, which is Martians? Well, according to him, you should write what you know about what you don't know or what you don't know about what you know. Keep it close enough to home that your heart is in it but far enough away that the imagination can take over."
• Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.
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