![]() ![]() Henkin specializes in melancholy stories about complicated families, and this one is a real heartbreaker. 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. Pru is 51 and Spence 57 and their only child, Sarah, has just left for medical school when discomfiting things begin to happen. But talent and good luck are ultimately no match for early-onset Alzheimer’s. Pru drops out, gets married, gets pregnant while Spence gets two Guggenheims, a Mellon, and a MacArthur. But Henkin’s fourth novel turns out to be a different sort of story entirely-tragedy rather than outrage. ![]() 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. “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. “So you’re sleeping with your professor,” Camille said. A superstar literature professor is struck down in his prime in the cruelest possible way. ![]()
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