Morningside Heights is tender, sad and somehow hopeful. The story follows the two main characters, Pru and Spence, through a courtship, marriage, and Spence’s eventual complete dependence on Pru as his Alzheimer’s disease worsens.
The two meet when Pru is a student in Spence’s Shakespeare seminar. Although Spence is just six years older, Pru is attracted to the dynamic lecturer and a whirlwind courtship ensues. Pru is from an observant Jewish home, and is trying to maintain her Jewish connections.
“On Saturday mornings, they would climb the hill to campus, Spence off to the library, Pru headed to shul. She would return from Kiddush with a piece of kichel, the driest, most tasteless biscuit in the world, but Spence liked kichel. She would hand him the kichel, swaddled in a napkin, and they would spend the next hour wandering around campus until it was time for him to return to the library.”
They marry and have a daughter, Sarah, who becomes a doctor. Spence also has a son from an earlier, brief marriage, named Arlo after Arlo Guthrie. He eventually becomes a high-tech millionaire, and plays an important role in the book that I won’t give away.
The book focuses on Spence’s gradual decline into Alzheimer’s. Henkin writes with pathos and truth. The scenes just after his diagnosis are especially poignant.
“Tell me all the things I’m going to forget,” Spence says to Pru shortly after his diagnosis. “Will I forget to love you?... Don’t let me forget to love you.”
As he continues to decline, Spence continues to come to the university and stand at the lectern although his teaching assistants do the actual teaching. However, after a bathroom accident, the university president tells Pru that Spence will not be able to continue teaching.
One morning Pru said to Spence, “I don’t know if you’ll be teaching next term.”
“Of course I’ll be teaching. They’ll have to bury me beneath my office before I retire.”
Maybe by the time classes started he’d be so bad off he wouldn’t realize he wasn’t teaching. Was that what she was hoping for, a decline so steep he wouldn’t understand?
“Am I going to die from this? He asked her one night.
“I hope not.”
“But will I?”
She couldn’t bear to answer him.
“I apologize for getting sick.”
“Oh, darling, it’s not your fault.”
The writing is sharp and clear. And by this point – about halfway through the book – I am completely enthralled with the characters. Most of the plot of the book takes place on New York’s Upper West Side, and readers familiar with the area will soon feel at home in the book. And despite the sadness, there is hope in the book. In the end, it is all about human connection. The characters, like all of us, are flawed, but they find a way to connect and in that way are an example for all of us to follow.
Morningside Heights, Joshua Henkin , Pantheon Books, 2021, 304 pages; $26.95