Feeling My Age

I heard bands on consecutive nights this weekend, and I woke up today feeling like I had mono. I took DayQuil to ward off the cold or flu that seemed to be on the horizon, but now it occurs to me that I'm probably just old. My eardrums hurt, my feet ache, and my head is stuffy. After reading the review of this new novel Matrimony, which follows the lives of four college students into adulthood, it seems that I am simply feeling middle-aged. This was particularly the case at Friday's Widespread Panic concert at the Ryman, which I attended merely for the purposes of cultural anthropology. Who was I ten years ago, and why was everyone I knew then obsessed with this band? All their songs still sound exactly the same and still go on for way too long. Coincidentally, their fans are all now coasting into middle age, as well. Looking around, all I could see were these thirty-somethings reliving their early twenties with as much and perhaps more gusto than they did when they were young. I definitely felt nostalgic for a moment or two, but Widespread was never really my band. That little nostalgic twinge, however, is, I think, very much akin to the zinger with which Jennifer Egan ends her positive review of Matrimony. Here are the two opening paragraphs and her final word on the book:

"The early pages of “Matrimony,” Joshua Henkin’s second novel, call to mind an academic trick employed by Carter Heinz, one of the main characters: “He had started to write what he called beyond-the-scope-of-this-paper papers, in which he would begin by listing all of the things he wasn’t going to write about.” “Matrimony” appears, by turns, to be a campus novel (it begins at Graymont College, a fictional liberal arts school in Massachusetts); a buddy novel (the middle-class Carter forms a friendship with Julian Wainwright, a wealthy New York heir); a writing workshop novel (Carter and Julian meet in one); a meditation on literary influence (the workshop teacher is a cantankerous institution reminiscent of Gordon Lish); and a novel about people writing novels (Carter and Julian both want to, of course).Mercifully, “Matrimony” is all of these — which is to say it’s none of them, really. Its beguiling quality derives largely from the speed with which it accelerates past these shopworn possibilities into something unexpected...(skip to last paragraph)...

But the emotional core of “Matrimony” lies with Mia, and it gains force as Henkin trips through the years. When Julian and Mia move, reunited, to New York, they must confront that greatest of all spoilers: mortality. And by the time they attend their 15th reunion at Graymont, any reader over 35 is likely to feel an almost personal nostalgia for these characters as we knew them first: brash, hopeful, merely playing at adulthood. If they’d only known."

Click here for the full review: Matrimony