Genre Fiction
![Joshua Henkin - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_a_joshua_henkin.jpg)
Morningside Heights: A Novel
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Book • When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. But when she falls in love with and marries Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn't have anticipated.
Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. The Great Man can't concentrate; he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. Meanwhile, Spence's estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father's last, best hope.
Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. It's about the love between women and men, and children and parents; about the things we give up in the face of adversity; and about how to survive when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.
Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. The Great Man can't concentrate; he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. Meanwhile, Spence's estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father's last, best hope.
Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. It's about the love between women and men, and children and parents; about the things we give up in the face of adversity; and about how to survive when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.
Editorial Reviews
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Book • Best Fiction of the Year - Chicago Tribune •One of Newsweek's Most Highly Anticipated New Books•38 Novels You Need to Read this Summer - Lit Hub • One of Good Morning America's 27 Books for June • The Millions Most Anticipated • Best Book of the Year - Bookmarks Magazine •Top Jewish Pop Cultural Stories - Jewish Telegraphic Agency •One of Alma's Favorite Books for Summer
"An intimate portrait of a marriage . . . A literary examination of love in later life, Morningside Heights highlights the complexities of monogamy, family, and love."
-Zibby Owens, Good Morning America
"[Henkin's] story of a brilliant Shakespearean and his wife-once his student-radiates a tenderness for the city that we, his intended readers, can best appreciate-perhaps now most of all, as we ask our city to return to us . . . Henkin is a fine writer with a wry fondness for his characters, but like any New Yorker he knows how to keep a safe distance. The specific letting-go that all New Yorkers must master if we don't wish to be crippled by nostalgia-especially now, if we do hope to see our city's resurgence-is particularly nuanced when a city neighborhood is also a college town, but Henkin more than meets this challenge."
-Jean Hanff Korelitz, The New York Times Book Review
"Henkin has explored the exigencies of marriage and famili...
"An intimate portrait of a marriage . . . A literary examination of love in later life, Morningside Heights highlights the complexities of monogamy, family, and love."
-Zibby Owens, Good Morning America
"[Henkin's] story of a brilliant Shakespearean and his wife-once his student-radiates a tenderness for the city that we, his intended readers, can best appreciate-perhaps now most of all, as we ask our city to return to us . . . Henkin is a fine writer with a wry fondness for his characters, but like any New Yorker he knows how to keep a safe distance. The specific letting-go that all New Yorkers must master if we don't wish to be crippled by nostalgia-especially now, if we do hope to see our city's resurgence-is particularly nuanced when a city neighborhood is also a college town, but Henkin more than meets this challenge."
-Jean Hanff Korelitz, The New York Times Book Review
"Henkin has explored the exigencies of marriage and famili...
Readers Top Reviews
Roger DeBlanckJean B
Morningside Heights is a family saga that is extremely fast-paced and compulsively readable because Henkin’s sparse, fluid prose makes the drama feel almost like a page-turning thriller. However, with the type of character study Henkin sets out to deliver, I never felt entirely close to the people whose lives became burdened with an adversity that would test any family. Spence Robin is the youngest and among the most talented and auspicious English professors at Columbia in the 1970s. When he falls in love with his student Pru Steiner, an Ohioan seeking to make her mark as an actress in New York City, their tender romance leads to a long, loyal marriage, with every up and down a lifetime together encompasses, until Spence begins to show signs of mental deterioration. How will their burdens play out? That is the noteworthy summary of Henkin’s novel because so much of the narrative is presented in snippets, much of which is interesting and kept me wanting to know more, yet Henkin seldom explored the opportunities. We’re barely introduced to someone important like Sarah, the daughter of Spence and Pru, or we’re often merely told something momentous has happened, such as Sarah has gone off to medical school, and then the novel just keeps racing forward without elaborating anything more. The chapters, indeed, fly by with covering over forty years, and yet the scant details of the scenes often feel more like outlines with chunks of dialogue spruced up around a few lovely descriptive sentences. Some events come off so incredibly condensed and underdeveloped that in a single paragraph Henkin takes the pivotal character Arlo, Spence’s son from a first marriage, from graduating high school to working at Wendy’s to finding his calling with computer technology to opening his own IT business to working at Yahoo to moving to Asia to becoming wealthy. Much of what transpires in this novel is only mentioned. Too many dots are connected to propel the narrative forward to the next drama. Stick figures and box houses, instead of indelible people, places, and passages. Nonetheless, even with the novel’s shortcomings, I still remained addicted to what would happen next, and the most engaging sections of the novel focused on Spence’s illness. Many of these touching and devastating scenes towards the end of the story are much more developed and, therefore, produce more emotion. In the end, however, Morningside Heights feels mostly like a decent sitcom book that you can binge-read, even as you can predict the end and know once you’re done that nothing overly lasting will remain. The endorsements of the incomparable Richard Russo and Julie Orringer drew me to Henkin’s novel, and despite any criticisms, I still appreciated the compassion and realism of the story. But I yearned for the beauty of the writing to be more. Morningside Heights w...
I loved this book. The writing was beautiful, poignant and NOT simplistic or filled with metaphors as one reviewer claimed. After seeing my bright, articulate mother decline oh so slowly to dementia (not Alzheimer's), I related to this book and the care the author took to emphasize the lengths the main character went to preserve her husband's dignity. My sister was my mother's care taker and her love and respect for our mother knew no bounds. I think the book was realistic and one I would highly recommend to anyone.
RMG
I found this book both heartbreaking and hopeful. It is a family story, and we get to know the husband and wife well, and the adult children are still evolving. The novel is set in NYC, mostly in the vicinity of Columbia University. The author excels at giving us snapshot images of people on the streets of Manhattan -- in a way so subtle, and yet so evocative. The story itself follows the deterioration of the husband, a renowned Shakespeare professor, as he succumbs to early onset Alzheimer's. Although I have not had to care for a relative with that disease, the depiction felt very true and deeply sad. But, as is always the case, the living must go on, and these characters do -- in poignant and insightful ways. There is also Jewish material that runs through the book, which is presented respectfully, although I admit to wishing the family had made more of its heritage instead of mostly throwing it away except for some nostalgic moments. A fine book.
LaurenFrances Kirsch
Morningside Heights is Henkin's greatest work to date. His vivid scenes, impassioned storytelling and vulnerable characters fasten you to the family's authentic and emotional ride through life's familiar struggles. It is powerful, enriching and tugs at your heart. Once you start, you won't be able to put it down.
Short Excerpt Teaser
1
Growing up in Bexley, in the suburbs of Columbus, Pru had been drawn to the older boys, thinking they could take her far from home. Her father was from Brooklyn, her mother from Manhattan's Upper East Side, but they met in the middle of the country, in Ann Arbor, at a freshman mixer in 1944. Pru's father was studying engineering, and when he graduated he went to work for GM. But he wasn't cut out for the auto industry, for its assembly lines and economies of scale, and Pru's mother didn't like Detroit and its suburbs-Ten Mile Road, Eleven Mile Road, Twelve Mile Road-everything measured in a car. But Pru's father was happy in the Midwest, and when an opportunity arose in Columbus, he settled on it. And on Torah Academy, where Pru, as a kindergartner, was dropped off every morning at eight o'clock.
Pru liked the Hebrew songs, liked apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah, liked staying home on Passover and eating matzo brei. But kindergarten became first grade became second became third, and she started to feel constrained. She had an older brother, Hank, but they weren't close; it was just her and the other students in her class. "Torah Academy's so Jewish," she told her parents.
"Well, it is a Jewish school," her mother said.
In eighth grade, on a trip to New York, the students were taken to the Streit's Matzo Factory, and to Ratner's for lunch. Years later, living in New York, Pru went out to La Difference, a kosher French restaurant, ostensibly high-end, but when she tasted her food, she told her friend Camille, "La Difference is this food sucks."
Pru's mother wasn't Orthodox-she'd agreed to keep a kosher home for Pru's father-and one time, a friend of Pru's saw Pru's mother at a restaurant eating breaded shrimp. When Pru confronted her, her mother said that when Pru turned eighteen she could eat as much breaded shrimp as she wanted to.
Was that why she was attracted to older men? If she couldn't be eighteen, she would go out with boys who were eighteen. In seventh grade, she dated a tenth grader, captain of the JV basketball team. In high school, she went out with a young man soon to graduate from Ohio State.
She was two months shy of her eighteenth birthday when she arrived at Yale in 1972. There was breaded shrimp to be had everywhere, but a curious thing happened those first few weeks at college. It wasn't that she missed her parents, though late at night, listening to her sleeping roommates, she would think of her family back in Ohio and grow teary-eyed. She lay in her dorm in her OHIOANS FOR MCGOVERN T-shirt while Derek and the Dominos looked down at her from the wall. She shivered: wasn't it supposed to be warmer on the East Coast? Fall had come early that year, and, walking across Old Campus, she was already wearing a parka. Torah Academy was eons ago-she'd gone to public high school, where her graduating class had been four hundred strong-but she wasn't prepared to be so far from home. Torah Academy had seemed too small and too Jewish; now Yale seemed too big and not Jewish enough.
She was no longer forced to keep kosher, but to her surprise, she continued to. Then spring came and along with it Passover, and she was answering questions from her secular Jewish friends, who weren't quite as secular as she'd thought. Why weren't peanuts kosher for Passover? Beer they understood, but corn and rice? And was it hypocritical to eat your cheeseburger on matzo?
She was again dating an older man, a graduate student in history, the president of the Yale chapter of SDS. Returning from services one Friday night, she joined him at an antiwar rally. One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war! Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win! But when someone passed her the megaphone, she handed it back to him because she wasn't allowed to use a megaphone on Shabbat.
She did theater at Yale, and when she moved to New York she tried to make a go of it as an actor. Camille had done theater at Yale, too, and they dreamed of starring onstage together. They found an apartment in the West Village and worked as temps. When their bosses weren't looking, they would leave work early for auditions. "Ah, the casting couch," Camille said.
"Would you do that?" Pru said. "Sleep with someone to get a part?"
"Why not?"
Pru wondered: Was she less ambitious than Camille? Was she simply a prude?
One day, Camille announced that she was quitting theater. She was tired of temping, tired of auditioning for terrible parts. Secretly she'd applied to law school. She was startin...
Growing up in Bexley, in the suburbs of Columbus, Pru had been drawn to the older boys, thinking they could take her far from home. Her father was from Brooklyn, her mother from Manhattan's Upper East Side, but they met in the middle of the country, in Ann Arbor, at a freshman mixer in 1944. Pru's father was studying engineering, and when he graduated he went to work for GM. But he wasn't cut out for the auto industry, for its assembly lines and economies of scale, and Pru's mother didn't like Detroit and its suburbs-Ten Mile Road, Eleven Mile Road, Twelve Mile Road-everything measured in a car. But Pru's father was happy in the Midwest, and when an opportunity arose in Columbus, he settled on it. And on Torah Academy, where Pru, as a kindergartner, was dropped off every morning at eight o'clock.
Pru liked the Hebrew songs, liked apples dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah, liked staying home on Passover and eating matzo brei. But kindergarten became first grade became second became third, and she started to feel constrained. She had an older brother, Hank, but they weren't close; it was just her and the other students in her class. "Torah Academy's so Jewish," she told her parents.
"Well, it is a Jewish school," her mother said.
In eighth grade, on a trip to New York, the students were taken to the Streit's Matzo Factory, and to Ratner's for lunch. Years later, living in New York, Pru went out to La Difference, a kosher French restaurant, ostensibly high-end, but when she tasted her food, she told her friend Camille, "La Difference is this food sucks."
Pru's mother wasn't Orthodox-she'd agreed to keep a kosher home for Pru's father-and one time, a friend of Pru's saw Pru's mother at a restaurant eating breaded shrimp. When Pru confronted her, her mother said that when Pru turned eighteen she could eat as much breaded shrimp as she wanted to.
Was that why she was attracted to older men? If she couldn't be eighteen, she would go out with boys who were eighteen. In seventh grade, she dated a tenth grader, captain of the JV basketball team. In high school, she went out with a young man soon to graduate from Ohio State.
She was two months shy of her eighteenth birthday when she arrived at Yale in 1972. There was breaded shrimp to be had everywhere, but a curious thing happened those first few weeks at college. It wasn't that she missed her parents, though late at night, listening to her sleeping roommates, she would think of her family back in Ohio and grow teary-eyed. She lay in her dorm in her OHIOANS FOR MCGOVERN T-shirt while Derek and the Dominos looked down at her from the wall. She shivered: wasn't it supposed to be warmer on the East Coast? Fall had come early that year, and, walking across Old Campus, she was already wearing a parka. Torah Academy was eons ago-she'd gone to public high school, where her graduating class had been four hundred strong-but she wasn't prepared to be so far from home. Torah Academy had seemed too small and too Jewish; now Yale seemed too big and not Jewish enough.
She was no longer forced to keep kosher, but to her surprise, she continued to. Then spring came and along with it Passover, and she was answering questions from her secular Jewish friends, who weren't quite as secular as she'd thought. Why weren't peanuts kosher for Passover? Beer they understood, but corn and rice? And was it hypocritical to eat your cheeseburger on matzo?
She was again dating an older man, a graduate student in history, the president of the Yale chapter of SDS. Returning from services one Friday night, she joined him at an antiwar rally. One, two, three, four, we don't want your fucking war! Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win! But when someone passed her the megaphone, she handed it back to him because she wasn't allowed to use a megaphone on Shabbat.
She did theater at Yale, and when she moved to New York she tried to make a go of it as an actor. Camille had done theater at Yale, too, and they dreamed of starring onstage together. They found an apartment in the West Village and worked as temps. When their bosses weren't looking, they would leave work early for auditions. "Ah, the casting couch," Camille said.
"Would you do that?" Pru said. "Sleep with someone to get a part?"
"Why not?"
Pru wondered: Was she less ambitious than Camille? Was she simply a prude?
One day, Camille announced that she was quitting theater. She was tired of temping, tired of auditioning for terrible parts. Secretly she'd applied to law school. She was startin...
