Reviewed by Adam Goldwyn
9.6.07

Joshua Henkins’ novel Matrimony opens in 1986, with the arrival of Julian Wainwright, scion of a wealthy family of Upper East Side WASPs, at his dorm for the start of his freshman year at Graymont College, a fictional elite liberal arts college in a fictional college town, Northington, MA, “an hour and a half west of Boston.” It is not, however, a campus novel in the traditional sense, however, because, as its title suggests, Matrimony does not stop at graduation, but takes us outside the college gates and past the intoxicating world of first love and then drops us firmly into Julian and Mia’s living room, so that we may see what happens after that first spark of infatuation fades, and an older, more mature, possibly even truer, love is tested.

At Graymont, Julian meets the people whose lives the novel follows. In his creative writing class, he meets Carter Heinz, a smooth-talking, outgoing kid from a poor family of California hucksters. At their teacher’s suggestion, the two become fast friends. Also at Graymont, Julian meets Mia Mendehlson. It is love at first sight from the moment they meet in the laundry room; the two are wed in their senior year. Julian graduates from Graymont, and the rest of Matrimony follows Julian, his wife, and his best friend through the next twenty odd years of ups and downs in their personal and professional lives: Julian’s struggle to get his novel published, Mia’s mother’s battle with breast cancer and Carter’s career in the dot-com maelstrom of the ‘90s. These ups and downs, however, in and of themselves, are relatively unimportant: Henkin’s concern is not what happens to the characters, but how the characters relate to one another as these things happen.

The relationship between Julian and Carter is the only fully developed male relationship in the novel – a friendship governed as much by competition as by mutual affection. Henkin writes: “So Julian and Carter were becoming friends. But Julian couldn’t tell whether Carter liked him. It came down to this: Julian was a rich kid from New York City and Carter wasn’t.”

Indeed, class conflict is one of the major themes of the novel. The unspoken question behind Julian and Carter’s relationship is whether or not two people from different social classes can be friends. Carter, for example, as part of his scholarship, has to clean the dormitory bathrooms, but Julian refuses to let him clean his bathroom, and even helps him clean the others. To Julian, this is simply one friend helping another, but to Carter, it is something entirely different. Much as Julian pretends the class divide between them doesn’t exist, to Carter, it is the defining aspect of Julian’s identity, and Julian’s help only antagonizes his friend: “What’s with the noblesse oblige…who do you think you are? The welfare state?” an angry Carter replies.

The class issue even colors Julian’s relationship with Mia. When they move into their first apartment, “he’d proposed that they rent a larger apartment, but Mia hadn’t wanted to appear rich. So they’d overcompensated, living in sparser quarters than most graduate students did.” Julian, of course, ends up resentful. Later in the novel, when they buy their first house, Henkin reports Mia’s thoughts when Julian first mentions it: “‘Let’s buy a building,’ Julian said, and that word, ‘building,’ seemed right to Mia, for he might as well have said, ‘Let’s buy the Chrysler Building,’ owning a home was so foreign to her.”

Matrimony is littered with broken and rotten relationships, and often the cause of the break and the rot is class: not just class differences, but also the pressures within any given class.

But the title of the book is Matrimony, not Class Differences at a Liberal Arts College, and the heart of the book is, indeed, Julian and Mia’s marriage. Henkin’s description is at its best when focused on the psychological import of the actions of everyday life. For example, when he and Mia throw a dinner party for Mia’s friends, Julian becomes resentful when he has to do the dishes. Reflecting on this, Julian thinks that “if their roles had been reversed, if he’d thrown a party for his friends and Mia had done the cooking and then, because he was tired, she’d been left to clean up… the guests would have partaken of the meal with quiet disapproval.” If this little meditation were meant only to show the corrosive effects of the nagging strain everyday life places on even the best of relationships, it would have simply been an interesting insight into male psychology and gender roles. It is more than that, however: Henkin’s skill as a novelist is taking such insights and melding them seamlessly into a unique context within the novel: it characterizes Julian’s slow simmering resentment towards his wife and reflects his own frustration and sense of inadequacy. Julian loves his wife and will do anything for her– he does, after all, do the dishes, whatever his complaints may be– but, even while supporting her in deed, his thoughts turn to his resentments at her success.

Henkin’s cast of characters is quite small: Julian, his best friend, his wife, and their immediate families. Yet, in spite, or perhaps because, of this, he is able to explore in depth a surprisingly wide array of issues universal to the experiences of marriage: from large issues such as death, betrayal and sickness, to more mundane ones such as whether or not to buy a dog and who will pay the bills, all the while staying true to the cultural idiom of upper class youths at the end of the twentieth-century. Despite the weighty sorrows Julian and Mia’s marriage endures, the reader can’t help but feel optimistic about Mia and Julian’s union, and marriage itself. It is a testament to Matrimony’s redemptive power that at the end of the novel, despite all of the difficulties the characters face, the reader might still want to get, or stay, married.