Joshua Henkin: Going the Distance with Your Characters

I began reading Joshua Henkin‘s new novel, Matrimony, last month while I was serving jury duty, and the story immediately engrossed me; the following two days just flew by. His fame is beginning to spread to other parts of the literary world; Jennifer Egan liked the novel and said so in the NY Times Book Review; the same week, his short story “What My Father Looked Like” appeared at FiveChapters.com.

One of the aspects of the novel that impressed me most as I was reading was the way that Henkin stayed with his characters and their intimate relationship over such an extended period of narrative time, and I asked him if he would comment on this for Beatrice. He was kind enough to oblige, and more than patient as I scrambled to find time, and then the right time, to share his reflections with you.

My new novel, Matrimony, took me ten years to write. I threw out literally thousands of pages—some of them perfectly good pages; they just didn’t belong in this book. A novel isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon, but when you get to the end of that marathon, you’re not the person you were at the beginning. Your voice has changed; your preoccupations have, too. And so you need to go back and revise yet again, so that what happens at the beginning of the book and what happens at the end feel conceptually and tonally part of the same endeavor.

When I began to write Matrimony, I was thirty-three and living in Ann Arbor, where I had gone to graduate school; my first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, had recently been published. I had also just met the woman I would eventually marry, and though our relationship would be long-distance for the first two years and we wouldn’t get married for several years after that, I knew from the start that this was the person I would spend my life with. And I sensed, in knowing this, that big changes lay ahead, changes I couldn’t yet comprehend.

I had also recently attended my tenth-year college reunion, and so I suppose I had reunions on the brain. When I started Matrimony, I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about. Hardly any novelist I know does; you just put your characters in a situation where something will happen, and you hope that over time you figure it out. I had this image of a couple attending their college reunion. That was all I knew—the beginning of the book. As it turns out, I didn’t know even that. Yes, there’s a college reunion in Matrimony, but it comes 250 pages and twenty years into the novel and it’s a relatively short scene.

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10 November 2007 | guest authors |

Simon Van Booy Gets Lost in Atget’s Paris

Instead of telling us about one of his favorite short story writers, as many Beatrice guests do when they have a new collection of their own stories, Simon Van Booy has elected to reveal another one of the inspirations that shaped The Secret Lives of People in Love. We don’t talk as much as we could about the visual arts on this blog, so Simon’s essay is a welcome surprise.

There is no greater comfort for a very lonely person than to see the photographs of Eugéne Atget. The first time my eyes fell upon the headless torso of a classical statue, crumbling in a winter park—then turned the page to an empty garden chair on a balcony of stray leaves, I felt the panic of an unexpected embrace. I closed the book and sat down on a small ladder. I was at The Strand; it was autumn. My hiding places were no longer secret. Someone else had used them a hundred years ago.

I was like an orphan who had accidentally unearthed an album of photographs that bore the faces of his lost family. Discovering these misty, black and white pictures mitigated the pain of a long loneliness. I no longer felt invisible. My vision of the world was shared—even celebrated. There were people here before me. People had walked in my shoes—had stopped to look at park benches softened by rain. They had left notes in the walls. I was a part of some ongoing love affair with overlooked details, an affair that had not begun with me and would not end with me. I was not the only person governed by feelings rooted in that most secret form of isolation: the ability to be alive and to be a ghost at the very same moment.

It’s not that I saw Atget’s work, which then influenced my work, but through Atget, I found the confidence to keep going, to take chances, to allow myself to explore the dark woods where the secrets of my characters lay buried. And so, I set one of my stories, “Some Bloom in Darkness,” within the photographs of Atget. If you look at the images very closely, you might even see my protagonist standing on a wall with his walking stick in the water, or on a bench sketching small birds. There are writers from whom we learn, and there are those who by some mysterious circumstance we come to know as members of our own family.

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17 August 2007 | guest authors |