Joshua Henkin – Jewcy

Reasons in Fiction

Joshua Henkin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:14:52 +0000

Having done so many readings of Matrimony, I recently decided to read instead from my new novel-in-progress. The section I read from was told from the perspective of a woman who, raised in a secular Jewish home in New York City and Westchester and having spent much of her teenage years in serious trouble (drugs, promscuity, bad grades, etc.), finds herself in Jerusalem in her early twenties and ends up becoming an Orthodox Jew. The section I read from, though it posited as its starting point the woman’s religious transformation (she’s now married to another newly religious Jew, and the mother of their four children) focuses in some detail on the character’s travails when she was a teenager. Perhaps because the material I read from was fairly sexually explicit and I was reading at a synagogue, the reading inspired some discomfort among the attendees, particularly from one elderly woman who wanted to know why. Why were my characters the way they were? Why, specifically, was the young woman I was writing about so promiscous, and was the reason she later became an Orthodox Jew because she was tired of being promiscuous? Though I’m not sure I managed to convince her, I tried to explain to this woman that fiction isn’t about reasons – or, at least, that it’s not about the kinds of reasons that can be reduced to a simple (or even not so simple) answer at a book reading. Fiction is about plausibility, certainly, but to make something plausible (to make your characters and their predicaments come to life, that is), is different from explaining them or giving a reason for who/what they are. Fiction is like love. It just is. As soon as you need to explain it, something has gone wrong. Another way to put it is that fiction is about mystery, and the job of the fiction writer is to evoke that mystery, to embody it, but never to explain it. Why was my character so promiscuous? Why did she become an Orthodox Jew? Who knows? I don’t mean that in a flip, offhand way. I’m the writer; if I don’t know, who will? But there’s knowing and there’s knowing, and there’s dramatization and there’s explanation. A novelist dramatizes; he doesn’t explain. Yes, he might provide some clues as to why someone acts as they act, but the reasons should never be simple, linear, or reductively causal. Who are we? How did we become who we are? These questions are essentially unknowable, and it isn’t fiction’s job to pretend otherwise. Because answers, as soon as they get articulated as such, inevitably obscure more than they illuminate. My job as a fiction writer is not to reduce my characters’ choices to an easy psychological explanation. My job is to render my characters in sufficiently convincing detail that they feel utterly true. My job is to make them come to life. I’m reminded of Martin Amis’s novel The Information, in which the protagonist, a novelist on book tour, is asked what his book is about, and he answers (I’m going on memory here): "My book isn’t about anything. It is what it is. All two hundred thousand words of it. If I could have said it in fewer I would have."

Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy. This is his parting post. Want more? Buy the book!

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What’s Jewish American Fiction Anyway?

Joshua Henkin — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 02:19:28 +0000

In the last few weeks I’ve participated on a couple of panels on the state of American Jewish fiction, and it was only thanks to the deftness and intelligence of the moderators and my fellow panelists that we managed to avoid getting embroiled in the question, "Do you consider yourself an American Jewish writer?" Other times, though, on similar panels, I haven’t been so lucky. It seems the question is close to unavoidable. I am, I would say, a not unreasonable yet curious writer to ask to participate in this discussion, and the fact that I’m both not unreasonable and curious points to what I think makes such panel discussions often less illuminating than ideal. I am not an unreasonable choice in that I am an American and a Jew, and an American for whom being Jewish is not merely an incidental part of his identity. I was raised in a religiously and culturally complicated but nonetheless modern Orthodox Jewish home, I went to Jewish day school and Jewish summer camp, I spent a year studying Talmud at a yeshiva in Israel, my wife is a professor of Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, and my older daughter has recently started Kindergarten at the Hannah Senesh Jewish Community Day School in Brooklyn. Although the rabbis who taught me when I was growing up would likely be disappointed by many of the personal decisions I’ve made, I remain in my own way an active part of a Jewish community, and being Jewish is such an essential part of who I am that to imagine not being Jewish would be a little like my imagining not being male: I would be an utterly different person. Then there’s my first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, which is a book that’s very deeply about Jewish identity. Two boys, adopted from different birth mothers, are raised as brothers in a modern Orthodox Jewish home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They’re adults now and are no longer religiously observant when one of the brothers is contacted by his birth mother who informs him that, contrary to what he’s been told his whole life, he wasn’t born Jewish. By any defintion, Swimming Across the Hudson would qualify as Jewish fiction if your defintion of Jewish fiction is fiction that engages directly with Jewish subject matter. But what about Matrimony, which, being my most recent novel and the reason I’m invited to participate on these panels, is what I’m expected to talk about? It’s much harder to argue that, by the definition I’ve just offered, Matrimony is Jewish fiction. Yes, Mia, the female protagonist, is Jewish, and yes, there’s a brief period, covered in about three pages, when, as a young teen, she becomes Orthodox. But aside from that, she’s Jewish, as the old joke goes, on her mother’s and father’s sides only. The subject of Jewish religion or Jewish culture hardly ever comes up. Mia marries Julian, a WASP, and the question of intermarriage doesn’t get broached. It’s simply not an issue for them. It’s this last fact that has raised some eyebrows at synagogues where I’ve read and prompted some people who care about such things to ask whether I really consider myself a Jewish writer. I have to admit, the question leaves me flummoxed. Yes, I consider myself a Jewish writer, in the same way I consider myself a Jewish father, a Jewish husband, a Jewish basketball player, a Jewish home owner, a Jewish music listener, etc. I’m Jewish–it’s one of many things I am–and it’s hard for me to separate it out from everything else I am, nor would I want to. It’s not as if when I write about a Jewish character I put on my Jewish identity cap. In any case, it’s a little unseemly, I think, and not particularly fruitful, to measure Jewish fiction by the number of Yiddish phrases that appear in a novel, or by the number of times someone shows up at a synagogue. There’s an intermarriage in Swimming Across the Hudson and there’s an intermarriage in Matrimony. In the first book, it’s a matter of deep anguish for a number of the characters, while in the second book it doesn’t cause a ripple. Is one book more Jewish than the other, and was I more Jewish in the writing of one book than I was in the writing of the other? I certainly don’t think so. And if writing Jewish fiction means writing about the Jewish experience, then there are many different kinds of Jewish experience when it comes to intermarriage, just as there are many different kinds of Jewish experience when it comes to any subject. Some Jews won’t intermarry; some will intermarry with great regret; some will intermarry without giving it a second thought. But these are all things that Jews do, and thus, arguably, equally Jewish. What frequently happens on these panels is that there’s an (often unacknowledged) sliding between "Jewish writers" and "Jewish writing." If Phlip Roth’s next novel were to take place in fifteenth-century Denmark among characters who had never heard of a Jew, it would still probably be looked at through the lens of Jewish fiction because it’s Philip Roth. In light of where he grew up and what he’s written about so far, Shalom Aulsander will probably inevitably be thought of as a Jewish writer no matter what he writes in the future. But does that make his work automatically Jewish? Is Allegra Goodman, an Orthodox Jew, writing Jewish fiction by dint of that fact, or does it depend on what she writes? If it turns out that all of I.B. Singer’s work was ghost-written by a Presbyterian living on a farm in Indiana (as improbable as that may seem), is "Gimpel the Fool" a less Jewish story? To my mind, the whole category of "American Jewish writer" (or any other hyphenated category) feels limiting. I’m a writer, period. Sometimes I write about one kind of person and other times I write about another kind of person. I write about who and what speaks to me at the moment. Although I know others who disagree, I think there’s always the whiff of qualification when someone speaks of Jewish fiction or African American fiction or women’s fiction or Latino fiction. You don’t see in the course catalogue at colleges and universities courses called "Twentieth Century White Male Fiction." Part of the issue is that ethnic writing is a niche market with potentially large sales. To take the case of Jewish fiction, the Jewish Book Council coordinates the annual Jewish book fairs held at hundreds of Jewish Community Centers across the country. It’s quite a gravy train if you can get a seat on board. Every year for three nights before Book Expo, the JCC book fair representatives sit in a large room while writers of everything from novels to fitness books to cookbooks make two-minute presentations in which they flaunt their Jewish bona fides. It’s known among writers as the meat market. But a writer does what she can to sell books, and this is an avenue open to Jewish writers (and/or Jewish writing) that few want to pass up. Not long ago, I gave a reading with Andre Aciman, and he was asked whether he was a gay writer. His answer was (more or less), "Sure–if it will make you buy my book."

Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here for some of next week too! Stay tuned.

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Not to toot my own horn (OK, I will, if only briefly), but the book was a 2007 NY Times Notable Book, and the way this is relevant to you is that I’m offering a free copy to three lucky Jewcy readers. All you have to do is send me an email at Jhenkin at SLC dot edu with the subject "Achin’ for Matrimony" and you’ll be entered in the drawing. For more about the novel, click on here, and for those of you who want to skip straight over the foreplay and buy the book for yourself, your friends, your cousins (Chanukah isn’t far away!) here’s the place for you. Finally, a note to book groups. I’ve been participating in a lot of book group discussions of Matrimony, so if you’re in a book group, or know people who are, and would like a visit from the author either in person or by telephone, get in touch with me at the aforementioned email address or through the book group link on my website.

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The Pleasures and Perils of Google Alerts

Joshua Henkin — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 02:17:54 +0000

Thanks to Google Alerts, I get a daily email listing the previous day’s blogs in which my name appears. Now, Joshua Henkin is not a particularly common name (though there are three of us on Facebook), but I have always been dimly aware of a doppelganger. An athlete, no less (a wrestler?) who competed in the Macabi Games in Israel. This was always of interest to me, since I, a decent high school basketball player, had aspirations (delusions) that involved my competing in the Macabi Games. For those of you unfamilar with the Macabi Games, they are essentially a Jewish Olympics, though my friends and I at the Jewish day school I attended thought of them more as a Special Olympics, or, at best, as an athletic affirmative action program. None of which dimmed our hopes that we would someday compete in them.

Years later, when I was giving a reading at American University, I learned that the other Joshua Henkin was alive and well and was, of all things, the stepson of Henry Taylor, the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet, who taught writing at American. For several years I forgot about JH, and then, thanks to Google Alerts, there he was again, appearing in my inbox every morning: "Joshua Henkin Sandbag Fitness Program." Joshua Henkin is now apparently a fitness trainer in Arizona and he has created and patented something called the "Joshua Henkin Sandbag," an object whose specific contours I’m having a little trouble visualizing but that appears to make the owner of said sandbag a stronger and generally more fit person. Whatever the Joshua Henkin Sandbag is, when I turn on my computer I am often greeted with testimonials to the wonders of the Joshua Henkin Sandbag and the wonders more generally of Joshua Henkin himself. Though I did awake one morning to the following headline in my inbox: JOSHUA HENKIN IS FAT. It’s pinned above my desk now, and when I find myself sitting too long, at work on my new novel, I get up and go for a run.

Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Detailing the Decades

Joshua Henkin — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 04:12:49 +0000

Like many Americans, I find myself in front of my TV on Sunday nights, watching Mad Men. I like the show – certainly enough to watch it at least semi-regularly – but whenver I start to get sucked in, I’m yanked out of that dream state that John Gardner talks about by the show’s unflagging insistence on reminding me when it takes place (the 50s; actually, the show takes place in 1960, but the 50s are the cultural and political moment being portrayed). The degree of self-consciousness is so great – it’s as if the show itself were an advertisement for an era – that when we see a scene in a doctor’s office with the doctor smoking, we feel as if the scene itself were inserted just to show us a smoking doctor. Just to remind us, that is, in case we forgot, that it’s 1960 we’re talking about and, boy, were things different then. Now, there’s nothing wrong with self-consciousness, but in most other ways Mad Men isn’t that kind of show. This is not Being John Malkovich. It’s not Adaptation. It is, rather, by most standards fairly traditional on the level of narrative and character, and so the camera’s relentless focus on period details feels intrusive in a show that otherwise aims not to be. The same things happens in the movie The Ice Storm – a good movie, it seems to me, but not a great movie, despite some great peformances (Christina Ricci is wonderful, just as she is in the terrific Buffalo 66). For me, at least, one of the reasons the movie is distracting is the way it fetishizes the 70s details. In that sense, the movie is true to the book, though the book, I would argue, is a great book, not merely good. Now, in the book, too (perhaps even more so), the 70s details are fetishized, but they’re fetishized in a way that’s much harder to do with a camera – at least when the movie itself is otherwise fairly narratively conventional. The Ice Storm, the book, is narrated in a distant third-person voice (though at the end of the novel we learn that the whole book has been filtered through the sensibility and voice of the older son), and so the wonderful opening chapter that announces the era in which the book takes place is filtered through a particular character and a particular voice and sensibility. In the book, the era becomes a full-fledged character in its own right – which is what the movie may also be trying to do, but it does it much more clumsily. None of which is to say that movies and TV shows should ignore period details. But the ways in which a book is self-conscious don’t always translate seamlessly onto the screen, which is why it’s often the case that the truer a movie is to a book, the more trouble it finds itself in. (The Virgin Suicides is another example of a movie that’s very true to the book, but because the book is not a filmic book–it’s deeply internal–the movie doesn’t succeed nearly as well as the book does.)

Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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Post-Election Thoughts Before Obama Begins to Fall from Grace

Joshua Henkin — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:14:16 +0000

Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, is guest blogging as one of Jewcy‘s Lit Klatsch authors. His book narrates the lives of a young couple from the time they meet in college through fifteen years of their journey through life together.

So last Tuesday (can it really be only a week ago?) my wife and I drove down from Brooklyn to Philly to get people to the polls. We were stationed in northeast Philly, in a largely African American neighborhood, and I admit to feeling more than a little uncomfortable playing the role we played, the same role hundreds of others played (all the volunteers at our station seemed to hail from Brooklyn, and just about all of us were white, well-educated, etc.). I felt like a carpetbagger, and a very particular kind of carpetbagger. A white guy from New York come to Philadelphia to tell black people to vote for a black man. I wasn’t sure how I would feel if I was on the other end. So I was delighted by the reception we got, which was utterly enthusiastic, with not a trace of resentment from anyone (save from one middle-aged woman who was voting for McCain), and it felt to me that one of the wonderful things about this election was the way racial differences were transcended not just in the voting booth but in interactions between voters.

But to take a step back, I was an enthusiastic Obama supporter, though I never quite drank the Obama Kool Aid that some of my friends did. This takes nothing away from his candidacy, which was obviously historic. And he ran a disciplined, tight campaign, and he’s serious and extremely intelligent, all the things that we need in a President today and that our current President and Obama’s opponent lacks. This all goes almost without saying. And being only a few years younger than Obama, I have several good friends who were classmates of his at law school and co-editors with him on the Harvard Law Review, and the reports are nothing less than glowing. In his heart of hearts, he’s probably a real liberal, certainly more liberal than any President in memory.

That said, the guy’s a politician, and anyone who doubts that he’s going to govern very much from the center should have a look at Ryan Lizza’s long and thorough profile of Obama in the New Yorker from a few months back. It’s sobering and a real reality check to those who think they’re getting Adlai Stevenson.

But then, Adlai Stevenson never became President, and he’d have even less of a chance of winning if he were alive today. I thank god that Obama was elected. I’m struck, though, by the degree to which smart liberals seem deluded about whom they’re getting and deluded, even more so, by what the election of Obama portends. Yes, it’s huge and historic, and yes, the number of new voters was incredible, but all this talk about a permanent change in the political landscape seems silly, as does the argument that Obama proved that the way to win is to take the high road. Yes, Obama won, and yes, he took the high road (Mccain, by contrast, ran an absolutely scurrilous campaign, and anyone who wants to give him credit for giving a "gracious" concession speech, well I’m not even going to go there…), but he won despite having gone the high road, not because of it.

Obama won because Lehman Brothers collapsed. Simple as that. We are in the midst of the worst economic crisis in nearly a century, and the timing of that crisis worked perfectly for Obama’s campaign. Yes, he’s smart and charismatic; yes, he ran an incredibly disciplined campaign; yes, he managed not to be baited into becoming the "angry black man," all of which are notable accomplishments. But none of that would have mattered were it not for the economic crisis. Everyone hates negative campaigning, but politicians continue to do it because it works, and now there’s extensive neuroscientific research explaining exactly how and why it works. It didn’t work this time, but only because of wildly unusual circumstances. This was an election with perhaps the most unpopular President ever in a country in just about the worst economic crisis it has ever faced, and in such circumstances, Bill Ayers and socialism and Rashid Khalidi and Barack Hussein Obama and all the other nonsense that got thrown at him didn’t stick. Swift Boat wouldn’t have stuck, either, and neither would Willie Horton. John Kerry would have won this election. Even Michael Dukakis and Walter Mondale might have won this election. And anyone who thinks that North Carolina is now officially and henceforth a blue state is seriously deluded.

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Joshua Henkin, author of Matrimony, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and he’ll be here all week. Stay tuned.

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“Standing By The Work Is The Only Option”

Joshua Henkin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:55:52 +0000

From: Nellie Hermann To: Joshua Henkin Re: Standing By the Work Hi Josh– I have to say I agree completely (hopefully all our agreeing doesn't make our conversation boring, but I'm happy about it) with your thoughts about MFA programs. It's a complicated issue, and I don't think there's any statement you can make (is there ever?) that doesn't need some kind of qualifier. Maybe that’s just a way of saying that I can see both sides. I agree one hundred percent that there is a vast ocean of difference between wanting to be a writer, romanticizing the writer and the writing life, and actually doing the work and producing writing. In this sense, yes, a thousand times, to going to the library and reading rather than going to Pamplona to chase the bulls. Have you read Bellow's Henderson the Rain King? The book is set in Africa, and he'd never been there when he wrote it, and I think this is an important element of why the book works so well. On the other hand, I do think that the proliferation of MFA programs encourages a certain amount of laziness about writing that doesn't really serve anyone. Unfortunately not all writing teachers are as engaged as you no doubt are, or as my own professors were, and so the experience can vary so widely that it's really hard to judge. My experience in grad school was a good one, mostly because I had four wonderful mentors who were smart and challenging, and because by the end of my time I had found a handful of peers that I respect as writers and hope to keep as readers for my whole life. In the wrong program, though, or with the wrong group of people, I could see this experience backfiring in many ways. Especially at a program like mine, at Columbia, where funding is virtually unheard of. I do think writing can be taught, or if not taught then certainly guided; but there needs to be a certain quality of mind on the part of the student. A wish to be guided, someone who’s on the lookout and open to models, and, right, willing to put in the time in front of the blank page. That’s the real bottom line. I think that models and teachers are necessary to a writer's success and growth, but I don't think the MFA, per se, is necessary by any means. As far as the anxiety goes, I do think that the proliferation of MFA programs (and the accompanying criticism of them) contributes to a certain culture of writer-celebrity and also of writer-devaluing that is of no help to anyone. I don't know enough about the publishing business to make any kind of comparison, but I wonder at the numbers of works of fiction that are published today versus say 30 or 40 years ago, when MFA programs were non-existent. Are there more of them? Are they better, now, on the whole? I doubt it. There may be just no way to really get a handle on it. For my part, I'm not sure that my anxiety about publishing a work of autobiographical fiction has much to do with the larger societal idea that young writers haven't "lived" enough to have anything to write about — I think it's pretty safe to say that what I personally experienced before the age of 18 was quite enough to fill a few books, and I'm not worried about anyone coming back at me with that. It's not as if there is no act of imagination or art in turning real life into a work of fiction. But it's the flipside of the same coin; I feel waves of anxiety already, when people ask me right off the bat whether my book is autobiographical without knowing anything about me or the work. "Well you're young, so it must be," is the argument, which is twisted, and which is what I so want to rebel against. I'm also scared that people will read my book and assume, for this same reason, it's all true, because if it were all true (which it's not, for the record), that would somehow make the work easier to write off, and easier to have done. But at the end of this train of thought is that a lot of this is simply insecurity, and yes, again, the tentativeness needs to be eradicated, the apologies left at the door. Standing by the work is the only option, and solution. This will be my mantra, and I only hope I have the strength to follow it.

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“Every Word Counts”

Joshua Henkin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:49:37 +0000

From: Joshua Henkin To: Nellie Hermann

Re: MFAs

I know writers who say they don't read while they're writing for fear of being too influenced. But if, like most writers, you're writing all the time, then that means you're never going to read, which is a real problem for a writer since the best education you can get is from other books. Besides, I've never understood the anxiety of influence. We should all want to be influenced — just as long as we're being influenced by the right stuff. Imitation is how writers achieve their own voice. There was a class in imitation when I was in grad school — one week you wrote like Woolf, the next week you wrote like Faulkner–and everyone found it tremendously helpful. It's interesting that you mention Philip Roth’s visit; I had a very similar experience with Richard Ford. This was shortly after he'd won the Pulitzer for Independence Day, and he was sitting there with Charles Baxter, a wonderful writer and one of our teachers. Ford said that he and Charlie were both at that stage in their careers when they sometimes got paid for work they hadn't yet written and that was nice, but that the page was just as blank every time they sat down. And though at that point I had only published a couple of short stories, I realized that even if I managed to achieve further success as a writer, the page was going to feel just as blank. I feel that more than ever now. You reach a point where you know that what you write won't be so abysmal that it wouldn't pass freshman English, but will it be really good? Will it be magical, will it jump off the page? Why is it that we read a novel we love, and then we read another novel by the same person and don't love it nearly as much, and then we read a third novel by them and we love that one? Were they good and then bad and then good again? I just think that some books work and some don't and there's often no telling why. Charles Baxter has three early novels that were never published, and he might say that those unpublished works were instrumental in getting him to where he is. For the same reason, I have no regrets about the three thousand pages I threw out. You need to throw out a lot of bad pages in order to get to the good ones. In that sense, I'm temperamentally well suited to being a writer. What separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls is the ability and inclination to rewrite–to really revise in a deep way. I also understand what Roth was saying about the time between novel. In a way that's why I started to write novels in the first place — because I was having that experience to the nth power with short stories (with novels, it happens only once every few years, whereas with stories it can happen every couple of months). I happen to love stories, am perplexed as to why story collections don't sell (you'd think, with today's attention spans…), and think that in many ways stories are harder than novels because there's so little room for error, every word counts. The issue of not apologizing is important. Which doesn't mean that a writer shouldn't be receptive to criticism, editing, etc. There's not a writer in the world who isn't helped by a good reader (I have several who really saved MATRIMONY a few times along the way). But the key is never to be tentative. Fiction is about convincing your readers that something untrue is in fact true. That's no easy feat. A writer is basically up a creek if they themselves aren't convinced that what they're writing is true. You have to do what Zadie Smith told Charlie Rose: take your readers by the lapels and refuse to let them disbelieve. Sometimes I see real tentativeness in my students' work, even on the sentence level. They’ll write sentences like "she turned slightly to the left" or "he was a little nervous." Why not just say "she turned to the left" or "he was nervous"? Words like "slightly", "a little," "somewhat," etc — all these qualifiers — are littered all over my students' stories and they almost always weaken the work. It's as if the writer is saying, well, maybe you're not going to believe me when I say the character is nervous, so I'll say she's slightly nervous, how about that? I don't mean to make such a big deal about a single word, except what else are writers going to make a big deal about if not words, and it's a rare to be tentative on the sentence level without also being tentative on the bigger levels of narrative and character. I feel the same way about foreshadowing. Too many writers over-foreshadow–it's another case of under-confidence. I visited a book group recently — they were discussing MATRIMONY — and there ensued a long discussion of a key betrayal discovered midway through the novel (sorry to be coy–don't want to ruin things for people who haven't yet read the book). Anyway, someone asked me why I didn't foreshadow that betrayal more–why didn't I leave more popcorn along the narrative trail so that what happened could have been seen. The answer is that I didn't want it to be seen. In general when we’re busy trying to foreshadow events, we’re stepping out of our characters' heads and out of the fictional dream state. Flannery O'connor talks about a good ending to a story being both surprising and inevitable–you didn't predict it, but once you get there it feels exactly right. I think that's true not just for endings but for everything about a piece of fiction. Speaking of O'Connor, she also said (in her wonderful book of essays Mystery and Manners) that anyone who's lived until the age of 10 has enough material to write about for a lifetime. Which I think is her way of saying that there's no reason to be embarrassed about writing autobiographically — and so I agree, you have nothing to apologize for when it comes to your novel. There are pitfalls, of course, to writing autobiographically, but I think there are greater pitfalls to writing about material that isn't close enough to you. In MATRIMONY, Professor Chesterfield tells Julian that he should write what he knows about what he doesn't know or what he doesn't know about what he knows — sounds like a bad LSAT problem. But what he means, and what Julian takes to heart (and what I take to heart), is that a writer needs to find a balance between being too close to and being too far from the material. My undergrads, in particular, tend to err to one extreme or the other. They write simply what they know (a transcript of Friday night's frat party) or simply what they don't know (martians). But what a writer needs to do is be close enough to the material that there's heart in it, that something's at stake, that the writer is at risk, but not so close to it that the writer is concerned about fidelity to actual truth. Fiction is about using the imagination to get at a deeper kind of truth. All that said, I'd rather be too close to my material than too far from it. It's much harder to put heart into something you don't care about than to achieve the kind of aesthetic distance necessary to make autobiographical material work. Which is my longwinded way of saying that I'm all for writing from one's own experience, and though the plot/events of MATRIMONY are fabricated, the kind of people I'm writing about, the situations they're in, the concerns they have all come from my own concerns in some deep, even if hidden, way. My sense is that the anxiety I spoke of about writing about writing and the anxiety you spoke of about writing an autobiographical novel may come from a similar place in our culture — that we privileged Americans, children of the university, haven't lived enough and that if you're writing about your own experience then you're being narrow, self-indulgent, solipsistic, etc. While it's certainly true that there's a good deal of solipsistic fiction out there, I don't think it's confined to those who are writing autobiographically, and I think O'Connor is right. If anything, I think writers should be writing closer to home, not farther from it. Hemingway was certainly a good writer, but I see him as responsible (perhaps inadvertently) for a lot of the nonsense about how a writer should live/what a writer should do. I'm talking about this idea that the way to be a writer is go hike the Himalayas, or hang out in cafes in Paris, or Kyoto, or Prague. Well, all of those are fine things to do, but if an aspiring writer asked me whether it would be better to spend a year in Nepal or a year in the local library reading great books, I'd say the latter without an instant's hesitation. The writer as cowboy — this is all the product of some romantic idea that people have, and these are usually people who are more interested in being writers than in actually writing. This whole issue has very much been on my mind because I’ve recently written a number of essays in the blogosphere and in print about MFA programs — my experience being in one and now teaching in a few of them. I argue that, though MFA programs aren't for everyone, they can, if you combine the right student with the right teacher, be incredibly helpful. I know they were for me, and I've seen many of my own students make tremendous leaps. The attitude that is so prevalent is that writing can't be taught, that it shouldn't be taught, that it's all a big scam. I disagree strongly. What I'm getting at is I think the cultural forces that make people feel the need to apologize for writing about writing or writing autobiographically are also the forces that dismiss MFA programs as overpriced finishing schools. While I think there are many legitimate criticisms of MFAs, I think the programs and writing workshops in general are unfairly maligned. So I want to end this round of our correspondence with a question for you. I gather you went through an MFA program yourself. What was your experience like, what are your thoughts about MFA programs in general, and do you think there's any relation between the criticism of MFA programs and some of the broader issues we've been talking about regarding what material from life is and isn't fiction-worthy?

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“We Have To Take What We Do Seriously, Or Who Will?”

Joshua Henkin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:39:17 +0000

From: Nellie Hermann To: Joshua Henkin

Re: Writing About Writing Hi Josh, So many meaty thoughts to chew on. I have read Crossing to Safety– though it has been a long time, and I probably should revisit it. I loved it when I read it, and now I can see the inspiration for Matrimony, for sure. I am always interested in how writers use models for their work. I know people who look directly to the texts they've loved, copying structures exactly, and others who just owe a debt to a book because it inspired them so. But finding models is such a crucial part of the whole process, and certainly of pulling yourself back when you're feeling like you have no idea what you're doing. Which, I'm happy to hear you say, is so much of the time! It’s heartening to hear that other writers feel that sense of floundering. Philip Roth came to a grad school class I was in once and said that he never is more depressed than when he’s in between books. He didn't say that he necessarily ever feels like he doesn't know how to write another one (I mean this is Philip Roth we're talking about) but at least he has some version of that too. And I like the idea that maybe this is part of the process for novel writing precisely because novels are such beasts, in the sense that every one is (or should be) unique, and every one calls for a completely different set of rules and a different approach and attack, and the key is to have the patience to figure out the right tools for the next one. Hard, because change is always hard, and patience is always hard, and because you can never be sure you're on the right track. But isn't that always the way. I found what you said about the present moment (vs. flashbacks) so interesting. It particularly hit home for me because in an earlier draft of my novel I had the narrative leaping back and forth between a present tense narrative and long past tense sections. One of my first readers (and an important teacher of mine) made the (very key) point that structuring the book in this way served to devalue the past tense sections, as the reader was always waiting to get back to the present and see what happened next, and therefore disengaged from the direct emotion of the past sections. This led me to a complete restructuring, so that now the book goes chronologically, and the present tense part only comes at the end. It's so fascinating to me how important these structural changes are, in a novel, and how much these leaps of time (that, yes, as you point out, seem to a reader to be so effortless) affect the way the book is read, and processed, and understood. One of the greatest pieces of advice I got about writing a novel — which is exactly what you say you eventually did in your book — was from a teacher who said that the key to novel writing was trusting that you could jump in time, and that actually the more gaps you have that you don't fill in, the better. You you don't have to say "and then she worked in a restaurant for 4 years," you can just skip to four years later. Sounds easy, but it's so hard to take that leap of faith, trusting your readers to fill things in. I agree with you, too, on the "writers writing about writing". The distinction you draw strikes me as the right one: there's a difference between dropping a random reference to writing a short story, and embodying a character who happens to be a writer. I think, really, that that aforementioned teacher would probably even agree with that. If your character is a writer, and if you take him seriously as such, then it becomes another occupation, and it really comes down to the quality of mind that you apply to the treatment of it. I think your point about tentativeness is especially key, and is one I take to heart. I have been feeling like apologizing a lot lately…mostly for writing an autobiographical novel, which for some reason makes me feel some kind of shame, or need for apology…and it comes down to the same point. Never apologize! Tentativeness is death! We have to take what we do seriously, or who will? It's the same thing with finding time in your life to do the work…if you succumb to the phone ringing or to someone asking you to have a coffee during your writing hours it's tantamount to the same kind of apology, to devaluing the job as not as important (I am particularly guilty of this right now, too). Also, about sentiment: I truly don't understand books without it. It is always the writers who are straightforward about feeling and truth that I most admire. Have you read Stoner, by John Williams, by the way? Most people haven't, and I'm on a personal crusade of getting people to read it. It skyrocketed to my top five pretty much immediately. There are few books that are this clear on sentiment, without becoming necessarily sentimental. But I think, finally, what I found most enlightening about the sentiment in the Mia/Cancer part of Matrimony was the way that you took on her fear. I think fear is rare for fiction. It struck me while I was reading about Mia's fear that it’s rare for a character's fear to be so boldly portrayed.

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“Novels Are Such Beasts”

Joshua Henkin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:22:54 +0000

From: Josh Henkin To: Nellie Hermann

Re: Never Apologize Nellie– Thanks for the awfully kind words about Matrimony; I really appreciate them. I have indeed read Yates's Easter Parade, and any comparison to Yates makes me one happy guy. I think Revolutionary Road is one of the truly great novels out there–one of the best I've ever read–and I like Easter Parade a lot too. In some ways, the book that was most directly (if subconsciously) influential on me in writing Matrimony is another book that covers a long period of time and is also about love and friendship and writing and academia, and is also about two couples, and that's Wallace Stegner's Crossing to Safety. Have you read that one? A terrific book. Anyway, as to whether I always write like this, it's hard for me to know because after two novels and a bunch of stories, I'm still trying to figure out what “always” is for me. I do tend to write pretty simply and directly. When I sit down to write I'm hoping I'm going to write some big, complex David Foster Wallace-type thing, but that's just not how I write, and I think in any case that being simple and straightforward can be the hardest thing of all — no tricks to hide behind. I'm thinking, for instance, of Tobias Wolff's memoir This Boy's Life, a book I just adore. What I love about Wolff is how not written his work seems, how effortless. But as you yourself no doubt know — as any writer knows — it takes a huge amount of effort to make something seem effortless, so much sweat and endless revision, etc. What is in fact new for me with Matrimony is the temporal scope. My first novel, Swimming Across the Hudson, covers about a year, and most of my stories are in fairly compressed time, and the new novel I'm working on now takes place over a single July 4th weekend, but Matrimony covers twenty years. On one hand, it's a really sprawling book, but on the other hand, it focuses on a relatively small cast of characters, is told in only two points of view (Julian’s and Mia's) and, sentence by sentence, it's pretty tight. But you’ve really homed in on some of the key struggles I experienced in writing the book. Matrimony took me ten years to write and I threw out over three thousand pages. I was on a pretty long book tour in the fall, and when I told audiences that there were a whole lot of gasps and shakings of head at my tenacity/pigheadedness/stupidity, and then came the inevitable question of how it could possibly have taken ten years to write a 300-page book. It was a big and long learning process, and I won’t pretend it's over. Novels are such beasts. They're real leaps of faith in that it takes a couple of years before you know not whether it's going to be a good novel or a bad novel but whether it's going to be a novel at all. And then you have to start anew with the next one, and the page is just as blank. So I know exactly what you mean when you say that you feel you've never written a novel even as your own novel sits right in front of you. I wonder if that feeling every goes away. How do you write a novel that covers twenty years without turning the book into a boring chronology? How do you know what to include and what to exclude? I always start at what I think is the beginning and then move forward, but I'm often egregiously wrong about where the book is going. In fact, if I'm right about where I think the book is going I worry something is seriously amiss. Writing for me is a discovery and if I'm too sure of what's going to happen before it happens then I end up straitjacketing my characters in a preordained plot (and I get what a friend of mine likes to call Lipton-cup-a-story), which is the last thing I want to do. In this particular case, I knew the story was about a love relationship and I knew it took place at a college reunion. Well, Matrimony is (in part) about a love relationship, and there is in fact a college reunion in the book, but that reunion doesn't happen till about page 260 and it lasts for all of 7 pages. I teach writing, and I'm always telling my students that they need to take the here and now of their stories seriously. It's like the Passover question: why is this night different from all other nights? Well, it's the fiction question too. And I think for complex psychological reasons a lot of writers, and perhaps especially a lot of student writers, find it much easier to write in flashback than to write in the here and now, and so they use the here and now as a mere gazing-back point — an occasion for memory — and when they do this the narrative almost always feels inert and the obvious question is if you're really most interested in what's taking place in flashback, why not make the flashback the here and now? I had this epiphany when I was reading Richard Russo's Empire Falls — he does such a good job of revealing information in flashback — and shortly after that I began to think in a new way about the structure of my own novel. That's when I came upon the idea of the leaps in time — between each section of the book I skip about four years. It's like presidential elections. The reader is dropped into a new time and place and slowly s/he figures this out. And though a lot of important material gets imparted in the here and now, a lot gets imparted in flashback too. It was figuring that out — when to pause for longer scenes and when to fold in material in back story — that took me so long. The second big struggle was writing about writing. I'm not surprised your writing teacher said you shouldn't write about writing. Just about everyone says that, though it's worth noting that there's a lot of really good fiction about writing and writers, including Ian Mcewan's Atonement, Martin Amis's The Information, Francine Prose's Blue Angel, a bunch of Alice Munro stories (have you read "Family Furnishings"?), and many, many others. But it's become such a mantra — don't write about writing. Earlier drafts of Matrimony suffered from a deep self-consciousness on my part about writing about writing, and it really infected the whole book, even the parts that weren't about writing. The tone of the book was entirely different. It was much more ironic, playful, coy, at times farcical, and it wasn't working. I was so panic-stricken about violating this taboo against writing about writing that even when I wasn't writing about writing (and certainly when I was), I was too busy being playful and winking at the reader. At some point I realized this is ridiculous. Why shouldn't a writer write about a writer? There's good writing about writers and bad writing about writers, just as there's good writing and bad writing about butchers, engineers, football players, and taxidermists. I realized that if Julian had been a doctor or lawyer or a mobster or a secretary, I would take those occupations (and the aspirations that go hand in hand with them) seriously. When I have a student who's writing a story that has nothing to do with writing and then all of a sudden there's mention made of a short story the character has written, that strikes me as a failure of imagination. The student has writing on the brain and so s/he turns to the first thing s/he can think of. But when a writer is writing about a writer, it's criminal not to take that seriously, and criminal to apologize for it. To me, tentativeness is the death of a writer. Zadie Smith said something similar when she was interviewed by Charlie Rose about White Teeth: a writer must always go for it. As soon as I stopped feeling the need to apologize for writing about a writer, everything in the book changed. I began to take Julian more seriously, and he became a real character to me. Which is my long-winded way of saying that I think your writing teacher is wrong. As for the cancer material, I thought of Mia's mother's death as the central event in the novel, in that it prompts Julian and Mia to get married much earlier than they otherwise would have. But Mia's own health scare came much later on in the writing process and the whole question of testing for the Ashkenazi Jewish breast cancer gene came even later. In earlier drafts Mia didn't have a sister– Olivia was fairly late in coming. As for writing honestly about fear and other such powerful emotions, I always try to do that. A writer wants to be writing about big things–there should be something at stake. My grad students are so fearful of being cheesy and over the top, they're so afraid of sentimentality, that they rob their work of sentiment. Sure, you don't want to be sentimental, but you do want sentiment, and I think too many writers are so fearful of sentimentality that there's no feeling in their work. I think a writer always needs to risk going over the top. Charles Baxter says something to that effect in his essay In Defense of Melodrama. A lot of my students are so afraid of direct emotion that they're subtle to the point of obfuscation. And ironically, I think the more direct you are the subtler you end up being, and the more you try to be subtle the more you end up confusing the reader and actually not being subtle at all.

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Is It Okay For Writers To Write About Writing?

Joshua Henkin — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 07:04:08 +0000

To: Joshua Henkin Re: Matrimony

Jewcy presents a conversation between a Nellie Hermann, a young writer who's anticipating the publication of her first novel, and Joshua Henkin, whose novel Matrimony was called "beautiful" by Michael Cunningham and "lifelike" by Janet Maslin.

From: Nellie Hermann Hi Josh, Just for a bit of context–I am a writer myself, and my first novel is set to come out with Scribner in August. Because of this, probably, I read your book as someone who is feeling pretty scared of publication and is always on the lookout for models, tools, and advice as to how to handle certain aspects of the process. That said, let me tell you how much I enjoyed your book. I read it in two days, couldn't put it down, which is not an experience I often have. It reminded me very much of Richard Yates's The Easter Parade (have you read it?), namely for the way that it swept along, following its characters as they grow and change, moving in a straightforward way, the narrative blissfully free from tricks. I wonder, do you always write like this? I mean, covering this much ground? Or was the sweep of the book a conscious choice for this particular story? This is, I suppose, a larger question about novel construction (a subject I'm particularly interested in now, after finishing my first book, because it feels to me as if I've never written one even as I can see it in front of me…and I'm bewildered as to how it happened). How did the construction of the book grow or change? Did you start at the beginning and just follow the story? Straightforward narrative construction is always a bit of a revelation –Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake comes to mind as another example — and it makes me wonder what it exactly it is about novel construction that makes this style unique these days. Another aspect of the book that I found really interesting was the element specifically about writers and writing. You brazenly (and admirably) go right into the realm of the writing workshop, which I was under the impression was off-limits for a work of fiction. I had a writing teacher who admonished us never to write about writing, never to have our characters writing, never to discuss the act of writing, for the ways that it took the reader out of the dream-state of reading and made them remember that they were, in fact, reading a piece of writing, which for him was strict no-no. But I admired the way you did it…and it made me wonder about how much of the self-referential aspect of writers writing about writing is “okay”. Have you had responses on this score from writers and non-writers who have read your book? I wondered, as I was reading these parts, how they would strike me if I wasn't a writer, and how then I would relate differently to the narrative. Along these lines, a lot of what I admired about how you did it was how much of your own tricks of the trade you put into the book; how much of your own feeling about good writing and how writing is made. Do you feel any trepidation about having put this aspect of yourself into the book? One more line of inquiry, and then I'll stop. This is already enough to keep us going for a while. I really loved how you handled the cancer stuff throughout the book. I was particularly interested in the way you balanced Mia’s extreme fear, contemplating and even planning on having a preemptive mastectomy, with the great hope that is manifested in the act of having a baby. The balance of these two things was so human, and so honest, and I was struck by how few books are that honest about the fear that people experience (particularly people who, like Mia, have lost loved ones to disease), and the way that the fear is balanced by life. Tell me about the conception, if you would, of this. Were there other iterations of this phenomenon that you worked out? Did you wonder at how best to balance this aspect of the book? I have many more questions — we could discuss all day how the concept of "Matrimony" fits the book — how the book is also about friendship, and how the idea of friendship also dovetails with matrimony — not to mention all my questions about how it feels to finish a book and to move on from it, which happens to be my own preoccupation at the moment. But I'll leave it here for now.

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