Morningside Heights

April 15, 2020
A superstar literature professor is struck down in his prime in the cruelest possible way. "So you're sleeping with your professor," Camille said. "Weren't you the one lecturing about the casting couch?" OK, it's a #MeToo novel, you're thinking, set at Columbia in the 1970s, about a relationship between a 22-year-old Ph.D. student named Prudence Steiner and her only-six-years-older Shakespeare professor, Spence Robin, a dashing, auburn-haired campus idol who rides her around the Upper West Side on his moped. But Henkin's fourth novel turns out to be a different sort of story entirely--tragedy rather than outrage. Pru drops out, gets married, gets pregnant while Spence gets two Guggenheims, a Mellon, and a MacArthur. But talent and good luck are ultimately no match for early-onset Alzheimer's. Pru is 51 and Spence 57 and their only child, Sarah, has just left for medical school when discomfiting things begin to happen. Spence is cold all the time, misreads a party invitation, and, most critically, can't seem to make any headway on his book project, a new, annotated Shakespeare--though it would provide income they desperately need to support his disabled sister and his son, Arlo, from his brief first marriage. 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. The other point-of-view character is Arlo, a dyslexic genius raised haphazardly by his bohemian mom and his underinvolved dad--his trajectory is interesting but distant from the emotional core of the story. Some of the most powerful moments in the book are sudden insights into Spence's experience--more of these would have been welcome. Caring for a spouse with Alzheimers is an ever more common heartbreak, illuminated by this tender portrait of a marriage.

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Starred review from April 27, 2020
Henkin (The World Without You) 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. Their daughter, Sarah, a med student, arrives from Los Angeles on a delayed flight, and Pru wryly reassures Sarah not to worry (“It’ll be good practice for when you’re a doctor. You’ll be keeping people waiting for the rest of your life”). The focus then turns to Arlo Zackheim, Spence’s son from his first marriage, whose vagabond, self-centered mother left him with an emptiness he finds hard to fill. At 15, Arlo came to live with Spence for two years, and the marked contrast between his past and living with an erudite, structured father; a kind stepmother; and a bright younger sister is drawn with humor and insight. Henkin reaches further back to describe how Pru escaped her Orthodox Jewish family in Ohio and landed in grad school at Columbia University in 1976, and 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.

January 1, 2020

Award winner Henkin (Swimming Across the Hudson) travels to Morningside Heights, NY, where Pru faces the decline of husband Spence, once a celebrated Shakespeare scholar. The only person able to help is Spence's son from his first marriage, a wealthy biotech entrepreneur who has come to live with them.

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2021
In the mid-1970s, Pru Steiner moves to New York City to be an actress. She pursues a PhD instead and meets Spence Robin, the youngest tenured member of the English faculty at Columbia. They marry and soon welcome their daughter, Sarah. Spence's son from his first marriage, Arlo, has been moving around the country with his free-spirit mother. As a teenager, Arlo moves in with Pru and Spence. Diagnosed with dyslexia, he struggles to relate to a father whose whole life is devoted to books. In his late fifties, Spence starts to appear confused and fatigued. Early-onset Alzheimer's is discovered, and the family that was built around a man known for his mind has to watch him begin to lose it. Spanning decades, Morningside Heights follows Pru's evolving relationship to Judaism and her identity as a professor's wife. Sarah studies medicine and Arlo invests in biopharma, both wishing they could save their father. Henkin (The World without You, 2012) writes a moving, heart-wrenching account of a family's connections as they face a slow-moving goodbye.

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March 1, 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

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.