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“He was one of those people who stared at you with a meaningful smile on their face, as if he was somehow intellectually...
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This is the cover I wanted to run with. Ah well.
Inside publishing jokes are just the best.
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Let’s all take a moment.
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Adorable.
We had Joshua Henkin put together a Spotify playlist of the songs that inspired him while writing The World Without You. Give it a listen while kicking back with this perfect summer read.
“Motel Matches,” “Couldn’t Call it Unexpected Number 4,” “Radio Sweetheart,” and “Big Sister’s Clothes,” Elvis Costello. In case you can’t tell, I’m a huge Elvis fan. I chose these four songs almost at random (well, not quite), and I could have chosen almost any other four. It’s weird, because Elvis is a punster, and I’m very much not a punster, but what works in a song is often quite different from what works in fiction. I remember hearing Elvis play an amazing rendition of “Radio Sweetheart” at the Greek Theater in Berkeley when I was in my early twenties. “Couldn’t Call it Unexpected Number 4” is not a particularly well-known song of his—it’s the last track on the underrated Mighty Like a Rose album—but it’s a beautiful ballad, and my wife and I danced to it at our wedding. “Big Sister’s Clothes” is mentioned in The World Without You when Noelle muses on how she loved to borrow her sisters’ clothes. I don’t have a big sister and I’m not a sister myself, but I understand the urge: whenever we go to visit my wife’s sister, my wife is always going through her sister’s closets looking for things to wear.
“Daughter,” Loudon Wainwright. This song is played, predictably, at too many Bat Mitzvahs, but I still like it, and it seems appropriate for The World Without You, a novel, in part, about daughters and daughters-in-law. I heard the song not long before I wrote the scene between Thisbe and Noelle when they go skinny-dipping.
“Choice in the Matter,” Aimee Mann. I loved Aimee Mann when she was in ‘Til Tuesday, and I still love her. “Choice in the Matter” is about a woman who goes over to the house of the guy she’s dating and he won’t press the play button on the phone machine, which is blinking, and so she decides to leave. Seventeen years after its release, the song feels dated (who has phone machines anymore?), and I’m reminded of a conversation I often have with my graduate students about the problems cell phones pose for fiction (fiction is in part about the frustration of desires, and cell phones are about the fulfillment of desires—everyone can be reached instantly), but that doesn’t make the song any less dear to me.
The World Without You by Joshua Henkin is on sale today!
It’s July 4, 2005, and the Frankel family is descending upon their beloved summer home in the Berkshires. But this is no ordinary holiday. The family has gathered to memorialize Leo, the youngest of the four siblings, an intrepid journalist and adventurer who was killed on that day in 2004, while on assignment in Iraq.
The parents, Marilyn and David, are adrift in grief. Their forty-year marriage is falling apart. Clarissa, the eldest sibling and a former cello prodigy, has settled into an ambivalent domesticity and is struggling at age thirty-nine to become pregnant. Lily, a fiery-tempered lawyer and the family contrarian, is angry at everyone. And Noelle, whose teenage years were shadowed by promiscuity and school expulsions, has moved to Jerusalem and become a born-again Orthodox Jew. The last person to see Leo alive, Noelle has flown back for the memorial with her husband and four children, but she feels entirely out of place. And Thisbe?—Leo’s widow and mother of their three-year-old son—has come from California bearing her own secret.
Set against the backdrop of Independence Day and the Iraq War, The World Without You is a novel about sibling rivalries and marital feuds, about volatile women and silent men, and, ultimately, about the true meaning of family.
“So this is it,” he says.
It is. After forty-two years of marriage, she’s leaving him. At least that’s how David puts it—how he will put it, no doubt, when they tell the girls. And it’s true in a way: she was the one who finally decided she couldn’t go on like this. A week ago she asked him for a trial separation. She hates that term. As if she’s standing in front of a judge and lawyers, a jury of her peers. When she made her announcement, David said he wanted to give it another shot, but they’ve been giving it shot after shot for a year now and she has no more left in her. There are days when they don’t talk at all. She has reminded him of the statistics, what happens to a marriage when you lose a child. Eighty percent, she’s heard, maybe even ninety. Why should this surprise people? Already it’s 50 percent when nothing obvious has gone wrong. But David doesn’t want to hear statistics, and, truth be told, neither does she.
- from The World Without You by Joshua Henkin, coming out on 6/19. Keep reading on Scribd.
So happy The World Without You made the list! Read an excerpt now.
