Morningside Heights: A Novel

by Joshua Henkin Narrated by Kathe Mazur, Shane Baker

Overview

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.

Editorial Reviews

JULY 2021 - AudioFile

Kathe Mazur narrates this novel, which explores the impact of a devastating cognitive illness upon the marriage of Spence, a New York City university professor, and his wife, Pru—who are both in their 50s—as well as its effect upon Spence's two adult children. Mazur's winning performance is engaging, perceptive, and propulsive, and her pronunciation of Hebrew and Yiddish words is authentic. With understated vocal expression and subtle shifts in intonation and pace, she elicits the emotional complexities as well as the contradictions inherent in each character. In a cameo appearance, narrator Shane Baker conveys the Yiddish words in a letter from Spence to his sister. This novel, which might read as sorrowful on the page, shines on audio. M.J. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

From the Publisher

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 families (especially recombined families) through unflinching yet kind depictions of the ways we live now . . . His thoughtful new novel, Morningside Heights, proves no exception . . . Notably and satisfyingly, much of "Morningside" takes place against a New York City that is clearly beloved to its author. Henkin tours a wealth of landmarks and neighborhoods with authority and affection . . . Quietly told, the story nonetheless pulses with insistence: Attention must be paid. This subtle urgency opens our own awareness, lens-like, upon the implied human task, larger than any single calamity—that of attending to relentless change, loss, finitude.” 
—Joan Frank, The Washington Post

“Joshua Henkin is an emotionally generous, deft, witty, and deeply intelligent writer, and his new novel displays these qualities in spades.” 
—Priscilla Gillman, The Boston Globe

“[Morningside Heights] is generous, wise, and wry enough to avoid sentimentality . . . Astonishingly, Henkin transforms what could be a mighty grim work of fiction into a melancholy and tender one enriched by the viewpoints of a constellation of chcaracters.” 
—Elizabeth Taylor, The National Book Review

“Nuanced and sensitive . . . a deeply human portrait of deterioration.”  
—Emily Temple, Lit Hub

“The task of writing the story of a family dealing with the devastating impact of early-onset Alzheimer’s—without veering into sentimentality, or collapsing beneath the weight of melancholy—isn’t an easy one. But Joshua Henkin’s Morningside Heights manages to tell the story of Pru and her husband Spence, once a great Shakespearean scholar and professor, with such deep humanity and kindness that I forgave him for also having managed to write a page-turner (though it still feels slightly unfair to be able to do both). The novel is a portrait of a family in all its complexity and an exploration of care work—both paid and unpaid—the latter of which makes it feel especially timely.”
—Lit Hub

“What a glorious book Morningside Heights is, all held together by the amazing character of Spence.  I just loved it to pieces.” 
—Elizabeth Strout

“In the sheer pleasure of reading Joshua Henkin’s new novel—of following its swift narrative movements, getting to know its all-too-human characters, inhabiting its detail-perfect settings, its relentlessly accurate portrayals—of marriage and parenthood and siblinghood—we can almost forget, for moments on end, that its subject is one of the most painful imaginable: the loss of a self, of a marriage, of a shared life. But the real magic of Morningside Heights is the way it lifts us up, reminding us that ordinary people undertake extraordinary acts of survival every day.”
—Julie Orringer

“What does it really mean: in sickness and in health, till death do us part? Morningside Heights knows the answer. In this tender, wise, and unflinching novel, Joshua Henkin traces the bittersweet arc of a lifelong love, with all its joy and pain.” 
—Tom Perrotta

“You know a novel is good when the thought of leaving the world it creates and the people who live there fills you with sadness and a profound sense of loss.  Joshua Henkin’s Morningside Heights is just such a novel.”
—Richard Russo

“Reading Morningside Heights is an emotional experience. How much can befall a marriage, and what extraordinary demands must sometimes be met for loved ones to endure. But it is a delightful read as well, because the people here are such thoroughly engaging company. So much that happens in this book is unexpected that it reads at the pace of a suspense novel, but its greatest achievement is to make us feel that we are in the presence of real people, living out their joys and sorrows and making their way in the real world.”
—Sigrid Nunez

“Poignant . . . The book intimately explores both the ravages of [Alzheimer's] and its impact on family members and other caregivers . . . And it finds some relief from despair in the redemptive power of love . . . Touching and tenderly depicted.”
—Julia M. Klein, The Forward

“Painfully authentic . . . Henkin tells his story simply and deftly, with a narrative economy that conceals much close observation and human understanding.”
—Adam Kirsch, The Jewish Review of Books

“A propulsive, literary page-turner . . . Morningside Heights is not only a study in craft, but a testament to the resiliency of the human spirit . . . Morningside Heights reads like an ode to New York as it maps a narrative of loss, and asks us to consider what it means to live and love, where our faith lies, and what we leave behind.” 
—Sara Lippman, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

“A moving look at how families cope with unforeseen events and how relationships evolve.”
—Jewish Book Council

“With its impeccable plotting, well-drawn characters, and balanced deployment of wit and feeling, Morningside Heights offers all the pleasures promised by Henkin’s rigorous narrative attention—in aggregate:  a pleasure of precision.”
—The Brooklyn Review

“A family drama filled with compelling characters . . . The essence of the novel is universal, particularly its deft yet raw depictions of what it’s like to live, day by day, minute by minute, with an utterly cruel disease . . . Morningside Heights is a courageous novel, and a moving one.”
—Abigail Pickus, Hadassah Magazine

“A beautifully written novel . . . Morningside Heights is incredible.”
—Emily Burack, Alma

“Morningside Heights is a lovely novel, and a moving meditation on how the act of loving a specific person changes us. When Pru Steiner’s marriage to Spence Robin is tragically cut short, she has to take stock of who she has become in the intervening years. Henkin has written a beautifully nuanced story that I was unable to put down.”
—Ann Napolitano, author of DEAR EDWARD
 
“Henkin has managed to inject humor as well as pathos into a searing portrait of a family in crisis. . . . Morningside Heights is beautifully written, and nothing mars the undeniable power of this poignant and very intelligent novel.”
—Rita D. Jacobs, World Literature Today

“Morningside Heights is a lovely and bittersweet ode to the challenges of partnership and parenting, as well as a fond tribute to New York City. It is an especially worthwhile exploration of memory and identity, and the spaces where the two intersect.”
—Sarah Rachel Egelman, Bookreporter

“Henkin brilliantly conveys the complexities of a New York City family in this humane, compulsively readable tale . . . In 2006, Shakespeare scholar Spence Robin, 57, is diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, and his wife, Pru Steiner, is forced to return his book advance . . . [Henkin] shows how Spence was a wunderkind in Columbia’s English department, making the tragedy of his illness particularly poignant . . . Equally well handled is Pru’s transformation from wife and lover to caretaker—wrenching changes that Henkin conveys without dissolving into sentimentality or cliché, but rather leaving readers with a kernel of hope. This is a stunning achievement.” 
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
 
“A superstar literature professor is struck down in his prime in the cruelest possible way . . . Henkin specializes in melancholy stories about complicated families, and this one is a real heartbreaker. His portrait of Pru is nuanced and sensitive, following her into one of the darkest places a spouse can go and hitting the notes just right . . . Caring for a spouse with Alzheimer′s is an ever more common heartbreak, illuminated by this tender portrait of a marriage.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Henkin explores with great tenderness the many, many challenges of losing a loved one to Alzheimer′s . . . It’s impossible not to be moved . . . Despite this, Morningside Heights is not, ultimately, a sad novel.  Henkin imbues it with a sense of hope, a kind of appreciation for the mundane moments that make up a life . . . In Henkin’s masterful hands, this story of everyday events becomes bigger than the sum of its parts, a novel that explores what it means—and what it takes—to love another person, and to be loved in return.”
—Kerry McHugh, Shelf Awareness

“Henkin traces the complications of a complicated disease with insight, honesty and humanity, in a style that is as readable as it is consummately literate.”
—Library Journal

“A moving, heart-wrenching account of a family’s connections as they face a slow-moving goodbye.”
—Booklist

Library Journal

03/01/2021

Historically, literature has been filled with stories of the transformative influence that gifted educators have had on usually petulant students. Recently, however, literature seems to have yanked away the pedestal on which those admired paragons stood, leaving their flawed, beleaguered successors ankle-deep in mud. In this latest from Henkin (Swimming across the Hudson), the problem for brilliant Shakespeare scholar Spence Robin is early-onset Alzheimer's. Spence, a popular, high-achieving man of letters, rapidly comes to depend more and more on the help of his colleagues and especially of his wife, Pru. Though Spence's disease is the predicate of this contemporary narrative, the story's focus is on his family and caregivers and their struggles to balance the empathy they naturally feel toward Spence with their need to take care of themselves. Pru, especially, agonizes once she starts a new relationship with another man even as Spence continues to need her love and care. Nevertheless, though he recedes mentally and emotionally, Spence, through the agency of his disease, continues to influence and motivate those around him. VERDICT Henkin treats the complications of a complicated disease with insight, honesty, and humanity, in a style that is as readable as it is consummately literate.—Michael Russo, Louisiana State Univ., Baton Rouge

JULY 2021 - AudioFile

Kathe Mazur narrates this novel, which explores the impact of a devastating cognitive illness upon the marriage of Spence, a New York City university professor, and his wife, Pru—who are both in their 50s—as well as its effect upon Spence's two adult children. Mazur's winning performance is engaging, perceptive, and propulsive, and her pronunciation of Hebrew and Yiddish words is authentic. With understated vocal expression and subtle shifts in intonation and pace, she elicits the emotional complexities as well as the contradictions inherent in each character. In a cameo appearance, narrator Shane Baker conveys the Yiddish words in a letter from Spence to his sister. This novel, which might read as sorrowful on the page, shines on audio. M.J. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177324722
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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 starting NYU in the fall.
 
Maybe she was wrong, Pru thought: maybe she was the more ambitious one.
 
Or maybe she just clung to things. She had a new boyfriend, forty-seven when she was only twenty-two. “My God,” she told Camille, as if she’d only just realized it. “Matthew’s more than double my age.”
 
“Well, good for you!” Camille said.
 
For a time there was talk about marrying Matthew. At least Matthew was talking about it, and Pru, flattered, started to talk about it, too. Convention be damned, she thought, even as she cleaved to her own conventions, keeping two sets of dishes, one for milk and one for meat, making sure on Friday evenings before the sun set to extinguish the joint she’d been smoking.
 
But eventually, she and Matthew broke up, and she moved uptown and started graduate school at Columbia, in the doctoral program in English literature.
 
Her first day of class she looked up from her seminar table and saw Spence Robin, her Shakespeare professor, enter the room. He was only six years older than she was, but he was the professor, Columbia’s rising star, so when she passed him on a snowy afternoon outside Chock full o’Nuts, she glanced away.
 
“Are you pretending to be shy, Ms. Steiner?” That was how he addressed the class—Ms. Steiner, Mr. Jones, Mr. Thompson, Ms. Dunleavy—doing it with an edge of humor, as if it were a mild joke. “We do spend most of our day outside the classroom. It’s not like we just materialize in Philosophy Hall.”
 
A gale blew past them, and Spence’s jacket collar flapped up to his ears. His shock of auburn hair was covered in snow, and Pru was tempted to offer him her hat. But her hat was pink, and if she gave it to him, then she would get covered in snow, and she knew he wouldn’t countenance that.
 
They seated themselves in Chock full o’Nuts. “The coffee’s terrible here,” Spence said.
 
Pru agreed, though she was inured to terrible coffee. She drank terrible coffee most days, often from Chock full o’Nuts.
 
Spence removed a packet of peanuts. It was an old habit, he explained, a product of his fast metabolism. He’d been so thin as a boy he’d been sent to summer camp by the Fresh Air Fund, and when he failed to gain more than a few pounds, he got to stay for an extra two weeks.
 
The snow was falling harder now; at this rate, they’d be skiing home. Pru said, “Are we going to talk about Coriolanus?”
 
“Do you want to talk about Coriolanus?”
 
“As long as you don’t make me recite.” It was what Spence did in class, saying that word, recite, with the same little ironical smile he wore when he called her Ms. Steiner.
 
“How about you tell me where you’re from?”
 
Under the influence of the coffee, and urged on by the wind coming through the open door, Pru started to loosen. She was from the suburbs of Columbus, she said.
 
“Sounds like a tautology to me.”
 
She surprised herself by saying, “You little snob!”
 
“Little?”
 
It was true: he must have been six feet tall.
 
“And what’s in the suburbs of Columbus?”
 
“Oh, just a bunch of complicated Jewish families like mine.”
 
“Another tautology?”
 
“So you know about complicated Jewish families?”
 
“I come from one.”
 
This surprised her. With his rangy, slender frame, his pale face, and thatch of red hair, he put her in mind of the Irish countryside. And Spence—she thought of Spencer Tracy—not to mention his last name—Robin—well, you could have fooled her.
 
“My Christian name is Shulem,” he said.
 
“That doesn’t sound very Christian to me.”
 
In kindergarten, he said, he’d changed his name to Spence. At five, he became an Anglo-Saxon, at six a Francophile. “It’s the old immigrant story. I was trying to escape the Lower East Side.”
 
“Well, you’ve done a good job.” He was the youngest tenured member of the English department; the author, at thirty, of an award-winning book; a guest on PBS with Bill Moyers. “You’re not still religious, are you?”
 
He laughed. His paternal grandfather had been a rabbi in Lithuania, but his parents’ god had been Communism. He hadn’t even been Bar Mitzvahed. One Yom Kippur, he’d gone to the Museum of Natural History to stare up at the great blue whale.
 
She told him about growing up Orthodox in the Midwest, how she’d moved to New York to become an actor. “So here I am,” she said, as if everything she’d done—leaving Columbus, going to Yale, moving to New York to do theater—was in order to be seated where she was now, having coffee with Spence Robin.
 
“I could never be an actor,” he said. “I don’t like to perform.”
 
“That’s not what I heard.” His lectures were said to be packed to the rafters; people were up in the nosebleed seats.
 
“Acting’s different,” he said. “I’m a shy man.”
 
Yet here he was, talking to her—talking to this stranger.
 
But then he stopped talking, and she became shy herself. The snow had tapered off, and with the weather no longer keeping them indoors, she thought she should make her getaway. She got up, and he followed her.
 
“That’s me,” she said, in front of her building.
 
“And that’s me.” Spence pointed up Claremont Avenue. “If I work on my arm, I could throw snowballs at your balcony.”
 
“I’d like that.” And then, feeling foolish—she wanted him to throw snowballs at her balcony?—she rushed inside.
 
###

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