I'm a novelist--my new novel, MATRIMONY, is being published by Pantheon in October and is available for pre-order at my website, www.joshuahenkin.com, and my first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, was published in 1997 by Putnam and was named a Los Angeles Times book of the year.
Click here to see some reviews. Michael Cunningham, pulitzer-prize-winning author of THE HOURS, has said about MATRIMONY: "In the tradition of John Cheever and Richard Yates, Joshua Henkin has written a devastating novel about love, hope, delusion, and the intricate ways in which time's passage raises us up even as it grinds us down. It's a beautiful book. Here's to its brilliant success."
Check out the cover of MATRIMONY and the jacket copy and some other blurbs.
MATRIMONY is about the twenty-year history of a marriage--what happens when a couple meet in college (he's a Wasp from New York City, son of a wealthy investment banker; she's jewish, from Montreal, daughter of a physics professor at McGill) and end up marrying earlier than they'd expected and the ways that the choices they make (infidelity, failed ambition, the decision whether to have a child) and things out of their control (health and sickness, the death of a parent) test the endurance of their relationship. The book takes place in New York City and in various college towns, including Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Iowa City, and Northington, which is meant to be a thinly veiled fictional substitute for Northampton. What can I say? I've lived in a lot of college towns. And I teach at two colleges--in the MFA programs at Sarah Lawrence College and Brooklyn College. In fact, MATRIMONY is in part about the writing life, since the book's protagonist, Julian Wainwright, is an aspiring fiction writer and has been in a few writing workshops himself.
I live in Brooklyn with my wife and two small daughters and one big sweet golden retriever, Dulcie. There's a dog in MATRIMONY, too, whose name (Cooper) my protagonists come up with only after much debate. I believe you can't figure out who your characters are until you know their names, and the same goes for canines. And since I also believe that every novel should have a dog in it, I'm in the midst of trying to come up with the right name for the dog in my next novel (due at the publisher next spring and tentatively titled THE WORLD WITHOUT YOU) a currently nameless Australian ridgeback. So if anyone out there has any good dog names, let me know. You might even make it into the acknowledgments page.
Right now, I'm on a one-year hiatus in Philadelphia, where my wife, who teaches Jewish studies, has a fellowship at Penn. We'll be returning to New York in the summer of 2008. I should also say that on the way to dropping off my daughters at daycare this morning, a woman said to me, "Look at you, surrounded by females." She could have meant the dog too, who was busy putting her nose into something unpleasant. It's true--I'm the only male mammal in my house. My wife says that's why I wanted daughters--so I could be the alpha male. Who am I to contradict her? Or maybe it's that I come from a family of men (I'm one of three brothers). It's good to change things up a little.
Who I'd like to meet: Readers of fiction, writers of fiction, people interested in the writing life, in writing workshops, though I'm also happy to meet people who have never written or read a word in their lives prior to reading these paragraphs. I'm pretty non-discriminating, at least when it comes to these matters. If you want to meet me, I'd like to meet you right back.
NOTE TO READING GROUPS: Reading is at core a solitary activity, but it is also something that's meant to be shared. I have been heartened by the proliferation of reading groups across the country, and I have had the pleasure of participating in reading group discussions of my first novel, SWIMMING ACROSS THE HUDSON. Now, with the publication of my second novel, MATRIMONY, I would be delighted to join in your reading group discussion, either by phone or in person, depending on the location. If you are interested in having me participate in your reading group, please email me. I look forward to hearing from you.
