She’d never really given marriage much thought, and the more time passed the less seriously she took it, as if the fact that she was getting older, closer presumably, to actually getting married, no longer accommodated the fantasy. She’d read that most college students met their spouses in college, but “college students” included junior college students and state college kids from Oklahoma and Nebraska, and she understood that people like her, at schools like Graymont, didn’t marry their college boyfriend. Doing so seemed fantastical and quaint, not all that different from marrying the boy next door or even from the dimly exotic world of dowries and arranged marriages, of parents conscripting the town elders to marry their children off, as had been done for her great-grandparents in Eastern Europe. “What happens, happens,” she liked to say. But sometimes she wondered what was going to happen. With the exception of the year after she graduated from high school, the year she spent in France, everything she’d done had been a matter of course: school, school, and more school. It had always struck her as uninventive, all that studying, but now, finally, when she had to invent something, she wasn’t sure how to do it.” (Matrimony, page 63-64)
Recently, in my quest for 52 books (which I’m super far behind on might I add), I finished a book from the 2007 NY Times Notable Novels list - “Matrimony” by Joshua Henkin. The book itself was well written and I found the plot…relatable. It follows three characters – two of whom marry – through college and their adult life. They battle challenges, family tragedies and the tribulations of past wrong doings and learn the meaning of mortality.
The ending was slightly predictable – though that may be because of my bad habit to read ahead because I can’t wait to read 200 more pages – though that aside, I felt that after the climax, the resolution was too easy. I’m not going to give the ending away but that’s my largest criticism – the resolution happened too easily. I didn’t feel that the characters really learned from it or why they made the decisions they did. However, I kind of wonder if this was the author’s way of saying sometimes we do things for love that we can’t otherwise explain which I know that I can relate, I don’t know about you all.
If this all sounds intriguing to you – or if you want a chance to win a free signed copy of this novel from the author (nothing in for me! Just my HONEST thoughts on the book!) leave a comment here by Sunday May 3rd at noon EST with the title of a good book you’ve read recently. I’ll draw the winner Sunday night.
