Title: Matrimony

Author: Joshua Henkin

Origins: Josh Henkin emailed me through our mutual friend MJ Rose last year to let me know he was coming to San Francisco for an event at the Booksmith, my neighborhood bookstore. Josh is also the brother of UC Berkeley professor David Henkin whom I'm friendly with through my synagogue.

Synopsis: Twenty years in the span of a marriage beginning when Julian and Mia meet in college in the 1980s. Has chapters taking place in both Ann Arbor and San Francisco which means its subtitle should read "written especially with Kevin Smokler in mind."

Verdict: This is my favorite book of this year. It's not complicated, stylish, thick or hip and I don't care. A great story, about good, flawed people, told so effortlessly that think you must know them, or know someone  knows them or didn't you spot one of them at a show last night or in line at the post office? It goes down like hot chocolate but feels like an energy drink. You want you sprint to your desk immediately and write your own grand version of your own grand relationship, if only you could as well as Josh Henkin does with these people who don't exist.

Henkin reminds me of early Jennifer Egan (who blurbed Matrimony) or a Thisbe Nissen, both writers who focus on relationships and families and get unfairly pegged as lacking ambition because their characters are usually white, well-educated literates. I don't hold that against these writers, even though they often address my demographic and I'm embarrassed of it sometimes. Empirically, it takes tremendous skill to write fiction that's the equivalent of a great pop song: clear narrative, robust storytelling, pleasant on the throat but doesn't feel like having chewing gum for dinner. It's taking something that looks simple and executing about four times better than the criterion set by the genre. And it's the kind of book I love to recommend because, for most, it not only does not disappoint but surprises.

So I recommend Matrimony like I would recommend a sunset. It's not going to blow you away with originality. But it's there, elegant, quiet and beautiful, like the end of the day. It never boasts nor fails to live up to itself and it waits, with dignity, for others to find it and for you to return.

Seen: in the introduction to the 2003 Best American Essays volume, which I'm currently reading.

This week The New Yorker has devoted the entirety of its Talk of the Town section to endorsing Barack Obama for president. This will surprise no one (I'll throw another zinger. Eve Ensler doesn't like the Republicans either!) but it does echo the urgency the New York Times showed in 2004 when took up the entire editorial page endorsing John Kerry.

Setting aside all our separate political persuasions, I ask you, in the immortal words of Ronald Reagan, if " any of us are better off today than we were 4 years ago." I think the answer to that is clear. There is no perfect choice in any election but when headed in the wrong direction, the smart thing to do is change course.

It remains to be seen if Obama is the change he says he is. But I'm more than willing to let him try. And I hope in November, we'll be able to say, as one country and with hope, in the words  of President Gerald Ford that "Our long national nightmare is over."

Scarface: Shame of the Nation (1932): "Er, eh, crime doesn't pay, unless you're Paul Muni tearin' the business up in a performance that makes Tony Montana look like a soggy-diapered infant."

Notes: Considered the first crime film of its kind (taciturn cops, dangerous women, loving mothers and fedoras on everything with a head) and weighed down by a bunch of dated "crime doesn't pay" moralizing (the movie actually begins with a shrill title card announcing that what follows is an indictment of bootlegging and shooting people. As if you didn't know). Moves along just fine but really only with seeing for Paul Muni (who managed to play Al Capone, Emile Zola and a Chinese slave within 5 years of each other)  and in an ongoing attempt to see the entirety of the AFI 400.

The mission continues.

--Brendan Gill (via The Writer's Almanac).

Bully (2001): "a frightening indictment of a society that offers absolutely nothing to some of its children--and an indictment of the children, who lack the imagination and courage to try to escape"  --Roger Ebert (in his four-star review).

Note: Based on a true story.

American Gigolo (1980): "A movie about loneliness does not need a murder mystery nor Lauren Hutton to spice up the proceedings."

"I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood."

Paul Newman (1925-2008).