Morningside Heights

A Novel

By: Joshua Henkin

Narrated by: Kathe Mazur, Shane Baker

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Book • When Ohio-born Pru Steiner arrives in New York in 1976, she follows in a long tradition of young people determined to take the city by storm. But when she falls in love with and marries Spence Robin, her hotshot young Shakespeare professor, her life takes a turn she couldn’t have anticipated.

Thirty years later, something is wrong with Spence. The Great Man can’t concentrate; he falls asleep reading The New York Review of Books. With their daughter, Sarah, away at medical school, Pru must struggle on her own to care for him. One day, feeling especially isolated, Pru meets a man, and the possibility of new romance blooms. Meanwhile, Spence’s estranged son from his first marriage has come back into their lives. Arlo, a wealthy entrepreneur who invests in biotech, may be his father’s last, best hope.

Morningside Heights is a sweeping and compassionate novel about a marriage surviving hardship. It’s about the love between women and men, and children and parents; about the things we give up in the face of adversity; and about how to survive when life turns out differently from what we thought we signed up for.

Wonderful, moving, touching

For me, this was a powerful emotional experience. I connected with so many aspects of the story. I knew author Joshua Henkin’s father from my time at Penn when I was an undergrad and Professor Henkin taught at Penn Law School. I knew author Henkin’s brother who was the Music director at a day camp my children attended and the choir director at a high school they attended. But most of all I was able to reminisce about Morningside Heights where I lived as a Columbia Graduate Student and where I now live as a Retired professor. Like Spence and Pru in the novel I too had an apartment on Claremont Avenue and snacked in the Chock full of Nuts that no longer can be found on the corner of 116th and Broadway. I agree that Chock full’s coffee was awful (but they served tasty cream cheese on date nut bread sandwiches). But what made this such a special book was the touching and heartbreaking struggles that family members had to grapple with. Coping with the decline in intellectual and physical abilities of a loved one having Alzheimer’s. Dealing with guilt feelings of an overburdened caregiver. Struggling with a strained father-son relationship and that same son contending with a self-centered guilt-tripping mother. This book had everything. It is a powerful and gripping novel. Do yourself a favor and read it or listen to the audiobook.

Okay

Fine audio. Wanted to love this story but just didn't fully connect with any of the characters at a heart level. Maybe I'm simply not a modern fiction person and should stick with the classics... I can see how it would be meaningful for a New Yorker.

A sensitive story, poignantly told

Joshua Henkin constructed a small screen slowly evolving medical tragedy on the frame of a love relationship surviving almost unscathed to the end. He gets the medical details, sadly, spot on, and the academia and the Upper West Side elements believable and not overplayed. Pru Steiner, the heroine, is a heroine, an Aysheis Chai’el of the old school regardless of her 21st C UMC trappings.
And compliments to the narrator, K Mazur, for her command of the intent and intonation of the passages in Hebrew.
High marks to all involved in Morningside Heights creation and this production.
Wm R Greenfield MD

shallow emotionally stunted characters

Maybe it's the culture of the characters, I am not sure but typically when I read or listen to a book it's to escape to another person's life where I come away feeling inspired and that I am not living enough! listening to this very blasé book about the super boring people and their everyday boring lives was mind numbing. and for the life of me I cannot figure out why the son felt his father was a poor father when all he did was try to get close to him only to be shoved away. Very bizarre perspective on that one. There are far more other books about atrocious parenting then what was here and I felt it did not call for rejection of his father, that one is on that kid, who was quite odd, and not in an interesting way.

“Meh”

Really wanted to like this book — New York, family saga, academic setting … kept hoping it would improve, but found it poorly paced, self-indulgent, shallow and boring. Made it all the way through, and don’t feel that it was a good investment of time. The narrator did a good job.