Notebook On Cities And Culture

Colin Marshall sits down in West Hollywood with novelist Joshua Henkin, author most recently of The World Without You, for their first conversation in four and a half years since his previous appearance on The Marketplace of Ideas. They discuss how the new book makes a space for characters to converge rather than occupying the space between two people, like his last one; the authorial balance between knowing too much and knowing too little, and the need to address the same question in fiction you would on Passover of "why this night is different from all other nights"; his bringing in a divorce, a death, the war in Iraq, and July 4th, and how much is too much; his tendency to throw away thousands of pages when refining each novel, observing the economist's principle of sunk costs; how character is plot, and how stories go wrong when character isn't plot; his ways of fictionally repurposing pieces of his own life that few readers would guess; the dangers of writing about recent-past events, and doing so while