Joshua Henkin is the author of the novels
Matrimony, a
New York Times Notable Book, and
Swimming Across the Hudson, a
Los Angeles Times Notable Book and
The World Without You, winner of the 2012 Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish American Fiction and a Finalist for the 2012 National Jewish Book Award.
One of
his five best portraits of grief, as told to the
Wall Street Journal:
The Age of Grief
by Jane Smiley (1987)
Jane Smiley's stunning novel captures an entire marriage in 92 pages. "I am thirty-five years old," the protagonist announces, "and it seems to me that I have arrived at the age of grief." He is a dentist whose wife, also a dentist, is having an affair with a fellow singer 
from her choral group. The husband hasn't caught his wife, exactly; he just knows it. His single goal is to prevent her from confessing to the affair: "It was tempting, very tempting, not to know what I knew, but I knew that if I relaxed, she would tell me, and then I would really know it." The novel is filled with lovely ruminations—about dentistry ("in their hearts, most dentists are certain that their patients can't be trusted with their teeth, but you can't grieve for every tooth, every mouth"), about marriage and parenthood, work and destiny. The protagonist ruminates by disposition but also because he can't face what's happening. "The Age of Grief" is about the power of silence, about the narrator's insistence on maintaining routine (daughters to take care of, root canals to perform) even as the truth bludgeons him.
Read about
another book on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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