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JOSHUA HENKIN (Ali Price) |
Matrimony
By Joshua Henkin
Pantheon, 291 pp., $23.95
The freshmen sit in the dorm on their first night, their heads enveloped in Saran Wrap. Actually, it is dental dams. "Would you like passion fruit? Or strawberry?" asks the "peer contraceptive counselor," offering a choice of spermicides.
The opening section of "Matrimony" provides a nicely zany portrait of life at Graymont College, bucolic and ultraprogressive with a brochure featuring pictures of Jean Jacques Rousseau and a cow. "Matrimony," Joshua Henkin's second novel, promises a scintillating account of four friends, soon to become two couples, who attend it.
Their talk sparkles as they fizz through four years of campus life, relishing its freedoms and pleasures, and, most of all, each other. The sparkly dwindles to the believable as their lives continue, diverge, turn difficult and much heavier over the adult years that follow. The book turns heavy, too.
The interest of sustained conversations depends eventually on the character of those who conduct them. Otherwise, they become like a witty guest who at the end of the evening will neither leave nor help with the dishes. Neither Julian and Mia, nor Carter and Pilar, have much character in themselves. They have attributes, of course, and events that they confront and go through.
The first fizz flattened, they resemble not so much people as fictionalized renderings of a year's subscription to the manners and mores, the career paths, gender struggles, and domestic tensions, the (not very sexy) sex columns, and, in short, the whole range of matters found in the lifestyle sections and trend-sniffing features of respectable publications such as this one.
Also with occasional excursions into the business section (Carter makes a dot-com fortune), book section (Julian goes to a writers' workshop and hates it), and science and medical columns (Mia discovers she has a cancer gene common to Ashkenazi Jews).
It is the two men who bond first. Julian is the scion of a rich WASP family living on New York's Sutton Place. Rejecting his stockbroker father's values and ambitions, he aspires to be a writer, and it is in the creative writing class that he meets Carter - rough-mannered, earthy, and sensitive.
A moment of early fizz: Professor Chesterfield, the instructor, cautions against the use of pedestrian dialogue on the order of "Please pass the salt." But, Carter asks, not in the least innocently, what if the character being asked is a quadriplegic? It makes him an instant favorite with Chesterfield, a sardonic martinet with an eye for the coeds and a writer's block.
Like several other characters - Julian's roommate, for instance - Chesterfield enters on a promising flourish only to be discarded (though toward the end he will reappear with an unpublishable novel). Henkin uses these figures not as characters but as plot agents.
Carter, son of a failed West Coast entrepreneur, churns up a mix of love and resentment toward his privileged friend, even though Julian scrupulously avoids flaunting - or even enjoying - his wealth. Later it will churn him to make his own millions after a buyout of his start-up company. It will drive him to a one-night seduction of Mia, which they regret - she instantly, he eventually. (Pilar has split and we hear of her no more.)
Julian and Mia's early idyll is a handbook of young fun things - good meals, quality sex, a carefree ramble through Boston that polishes up the most thoroughly polished tourist spots. When Mia's mother dies of cancer, carefree loses the free, and she and Julian advance their plans and get married.
"Matrimony" skips four years, and from here on, skip slows to plod. The couple are living under increasing strain in Ann Arbor, Mich., where Mia does graduate work in psychology and Julian struggles endlessly over a novel. There is friction - predictable, generic - what with her hard-driving studies and his long hours in the tiny apartment, seemingly just sitting there.
In marriage, there can be no private writer's block; Mia feels she's been harnessed to a state of permanent artistic frustration. There are quarrels about dishes; there is a flirty student. Plod creeps along a path not just beaten but pulverized. The conversation, as I say, is good.
When Julian learns from Carter of the one-night adultery, and hears Mia's apologetic admission, plod takes a spastic leap. Abruptly, and seemingly quite out of character, Julian vanishes, decamping for a grisly year or so (all cliques and backbiting) at what is clearly the prestigious Iowa Writers' Workshop, though it's not named.
He returns; they reconcile and move to New York. She works as a counselor and discovers her cancer gene; he finishes his novel and starts another. They have a baby (more time skips), buy a house, and attend a regretfully mellow 15th college reunion. Mellowly, regretfully, Carter turns up.
Someone has just switched on the light. Not the characters but the author. The view in any case has not improved much.
Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.
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