Joshua Henkin’s 'The World Without You' 370.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
Joshua Henkin’s third novel, The World Without You, opens with a family readying
for a memorial service one year after their journalist son, Leo Frankel, was
killed in the Middle East. There seems to be no way out of the anguish over his
untimely death; yet as the novel progresses, the author opens a window onto the
family’s immutable grief, and somehow, all the characters begin in their own
ways to move forward with their lives, without their son, brother, husband and
father.
Henkin, a professor of creative writing in the MFA program at
Brooklyn College, says his intention with this book was to write a “domestic
drama,” despite the presence of political and social themes. The family is
Jewish – the youngest sister, the last one to have seen her brother alive, is
newly religious and lives in Jerusalem with her husband and four young sons,
while the rest of the family members are secular, liberal, Upper West Side New
Yorkers – but Henkin does not want to be pegged as a specifically Jewish
writer.
“This is not a book about Israel or Jews,” he says. “I write
about characters, not about Jews..”
He thinks, he says, in terms of
character and story. “I do not believe in ideas in fiction. Characters can have
ideas, not authors. All things present in the book, the big parts of the book,
come in directly through characters.”
Despite his reluctance to have his
writing characterized as Jewish, he acknowledges that his Jewishness is a large
part of himself.
“Would I be a different person if I weren’t Jewish? I am
proud to be Jewish, proud to come from a traditional Jewish background; it has
made me who I am,” he says, but he is quick to add that “lots of things make me
who I am – that my father was an academic, that I have two brothers, that I am
the oldest child. No one ever asks, ‘Are you an oldest-child writer?’ but birth
order is hugely important in terms of development.”
He is also tired of
the identity politics that such questions usually entail, noting, “No one asked
John Updike if he was a male WASP writer, yet minority writers are always asked.
In general, these qualifiers tend to limit. Toni Morrison is a writer. Yes, she
is African American, but she is a writer.”
Returning to the book itself,
he says he originally had the widow of the slain journalist as the main
character, but “then it evolved to be more of a group book.” The idea of
exploring how the death of a child can affect the whole family came from a
personal experience, he relates.
“I had a cousin who died, in his late
20s, of Hodgkin’s disease. Every Purim we would get together with my father’s
family. My aunt, the mother of my cousin who was in his 30s, was the mother of
two sons. Her oldest son had died 30 years earlier, but she had to let people
know that it was the singular event in her life. Her daughter-in-law moved on,
but there is a gap between what it’s like to lose a spouse [and what it’s like
to lose] a child. A spouse can move on; a parent does not.”
The tension
in the way Leo’s parents, Marilyn and David Frankel, each mourn their son, as
well as the conflicts between them and his widow, fuel much of the plot. One of
the key disagreements between Marilyn and David comes when they are meeting new
people at a party some time after their son’s death. In response to a casual
question, David says he has three children, as only three are alive; Marilyn
sees his avoidance of mentioning Leo as an erasure of his memory and a
betrayal.
Henkin excels at portraying characters from a variety of
backgrounds and at various stages of life. Still, he says, “each novel I write
is less autobiographical in the narrow sense. This thing in my family was the
inspiration for the book, a guy I know loosely is a model for Amram [Leo’s newly
religious brother-in-law]. In some way, a woman I know helped to inspire Lily
[Leo’s sister], but in the end, those people are nothing like Amram or Lily.
Characters develop over time as different from how I thought they were. To me,
that is the pleasure of writing. The writer figures out the characters as he
writes, and the reader figures them out as he or she reads.”