For Better or Worse

MATRIMONY

By Joshua Henkin

Pantheon. 291 pp. $23.95

Writers are incorrigible autobiographers. That's why there are so many novels about writers. Today, those novels are likely to read like CVs, cataloging stints at conferences and writing colonies, adjunct teaching gigs, the requisite M.F.A. degree and years of despairing work on a project that doesn't meet the writer's standards. Such is the average writerly life.

Yet there is a spot on the shelf, perhaps beside Wonder Boys, Michael Chabon's story of a middle-aged writer in the doldrums, for an observant tale about the subculture of young dreamers that produces much squandered effort and the occasional genuine star. Joshua Henkin's second novel, Matrimony, begins as though it might fill that space.

In 1986, Julian Wainwright, a silver spoon in his mouth, arrives from Manhattan to attend a small Massachusetts college. The draw is the writing workshop of Professor Chesterfield, a man frustrated with his own dormant promise and his students' stories about space aliens and college hookups. He issues commandments, such as "Thou Shalt Populate Your Stories With Homo Sapiens." Julian falls in with fellow wannabe Carter Heinz, a young man with a working-class chip on his shoulder, and he meets Mia Mendelsohn, a beautiful Canadian with whom he begins an exuberant affair.

Then Mia and Julian get married. She pursues a graduate degree in psychology; he begins work on a novel and attends the Iowa Writers' Workshop. But the comic pathos and energy of Matrimony's young college years recede. In Iowa, there's no Professor Chesterfield to keep things interesting. Instead, we learn little about this hothouse of hope and failure except that most of the students are viciously competitive and blind to real talent.

As Julian labors on in not-quite obscurity, his and Mia's marriage takes center stage. In a literary landscape of neurotic singletons, we could use a novel about marriage undertaken by two highly intelligent and educated people of tender age. Henkin's quiet debut novel published 10 years ago, Swimming Across the Hudson, showed that he knew how to ask important questions about family and identity. But Matrimony must succeed on its characters, and Mia and Julian are unevenly matched. Mia's struggles with family tragedy and her own weaknesses provide the book's emotional core, while Julian engages in numerous Significant Conversations that offer a running explanation of a character never fully realized on the page.

Professor Chesterfield forbade his students to use pedestrian, "pass-the-salt" dialogue. That doesn't mean the spice of life must be left out. Favorite restaurants and routines are fine, but Matrimony fails to record the quotidian pains and pleasures particular to two people, their familiarity with each other's imperfections, the intimacy that make a marriage, or the way such relationships mature. When Julian and Mia's marriage is sucker-punched by a betrayal, the sophomoric nature of the infidelity and its aftermath leaches the drama from this pivotal event. Matrimony is an adult novel inhabited by people with whom you want to plead, "Grow up!"

-- Sarah L. Courteau , literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly