Excerpt from Matrimony by Joshua Henkin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Your father's a criminal?"

"Not technically." In high school, Julian had had a classmate whose father was rumored to be an actual gangster. Now, that was the kind of criminal father he would have liked to have. "My father and I argue all the time."

"About what?"

"Ronald Reagan, the Equal Rights Amendment, that sort of thing. My father says the ERA would have led to coed bathrooms."

"Would it have?"

"I'm not sure." He paused. "Do you think the ERA would have led to coed bathrooms?"

"I don't know."

"Me, either." Now he felt foolish. "I mean, who cares about coed bathrooms?"

"Not me."

"My father's insane," he said.

"Everyone is," said Mia. And now, as they stared at the laundry in the dryer, as they watched their clothes flip over themselves, they listed what was insane at Graymont, starting with the laundry itself, the dearth of washers and dryers and the number of quarters you needed to do the wash, and soon they had alighted on the cafeteria food, the sloppy Joes served every Sunday night in Commons, the tortuous lines for the salad bar. Then they moved on to the library and the gym, the reserve stacks at McMillan Library, where you weren't admitted, so you had to wait for the librarian to get your book ("I mean, it's a library," Julian said. "Don't they understand the meaning of 'browse'?"), the wait for the Nautilus machines and the byzantine process to sign up for them, and now, circuitously but inexorably, they had wound their way back to the laundry: did it really have to be so laborious?

Suddenly, though, Mia had switched course. She was talking about the ways good fortune shone on them, how they were at Graymont, a fine college, and their parents were paying for their education. There were people starving in Ethiopia, or holed up in the Nicaraguan hills. What were the odds of their being alive in the first place, because when her parents got together, in that act of love, what were the chances she'd be the result of that? "Oh, God," she said, "is that not the most banal thing you've ever heard? That things could have been different?"

"Well, they could have been."

"Do you think it's the laundry?"

"What?"

"You and me here in the basement and there's no air? Maybe it does something to your brain cells."

"Could be."

"Still, it's important to remember how big the world is. There are cities in China with over a million people that you and I haven't even heard of."

"I was never good at geography," Julian admitted.

"Even if you were." Mia removed her clothes from the dryer. She was standing next to Julian now, folding her T-shirts and jeans. She pointed at his book. "Tell me about Hemingway."

"You haven't read him?"

"I have."

So Julian told her about the metaphor of the tip of the iceberg. According to Hemingway, the tip of the iceberg implied the whole iceberg; what you left out was as important as what you left in. "Less is more," he said.

"Is it?" Mia was sitting on the washer, smiling at him—a flirtatious smile, Julian thought, or perhaps he was just imagining it. Maybe she was right about the air in the laundry room; maybe it did something to your brain cells.

*****

Mia drove so fast it was astonishing she'd made it to college; Julian couldn't believe she was still alive. Drive faster, he thought, even as he held onto the plastic handle above his seat.

Mia said, "You know how they tell you to accelerate into turns? Well, I just accelerate into everything."

They were driving into Boston, where Mia's grandparents had lived when they were alive. She loved Boston, Mia told Julian, though mostly she loved it because she'd loved it as a girl; she saw the city through a child's eyes.

Excerpted from Matrimony by Joshua Henkin. Copyright © 2007 by Joshua Henkin.