A Dual Inheritance (64 page)

The Real Deal: My Life in Business and Philanthropy
by Sandy Weill and Judah S. Kraushaar,
The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs
by Charles D. Ellis, and especially
The Year They Sold Wall Street
by Tim Carrington were all helpful books. Also:
Boston Boy
by Nat Hentoff,
The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions
by Hillel Levine and Lawrence Harmon, and the exquisite
Shadow of the Sun
by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

I’m grateful to my parents, Judy and Stuart Hershon, for—well—everything.

And finally to Derek, Wyatt, and Noah Buckner, who make my daily life so compelling that it’s a wonder I ever managed to write this book.

BY JOANNA HERSHON

A Dual Inheritance
The German Bride
Swimming
The Outside of August

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J
OANNA
H
ERSHON
is the author of four novels:
Swimming, The Outside of August, The German Bride
, and
A Dual Inheritance
. Her writing has appeared in
The New York Times, One Story, The Virginia Quarterly Review
, and the literary anthologies
Brooklyn Was Mine
and
Freud’s Blind Spot
(among other places), and was shortlisted for the 2007
O. Henry Prize Stories
. She has taught in the creative writing program at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, painter Derek Buckner, and their twin sons.

A TALK WITH JOANNA HERSHON
AUTHOR OF
A DUAL INHERITANCE

On the surface, your novels are quite different from one another
.
Swimming
is a coming-of-age story;
The Outside of August
chronicles a young woman’s search for her elusive mother;
The German Bride
, hailed as a best book of 2008 by
Vogue
,
NPR
and the
Washington Post
, is a work of historical fiction about a German Jewess who marries into the American West. What links your books together? In what ways does A DUAL INHERITANCE mark a departure for you?

I write about what unsettles and interests me; and very often those two things overlap. I started my first novel when I was about twenty-three, and it has been a while since then! My interests have evolved, as have my worries and concerns.

That said, I do think there are many links in all of my novels. I’m primarily interested in character, in observing how and when people lie and tell the truth. Siblings featured prominently in my first three novels, as well as a preoccupation with memory. But
A DUAL INHERITANCE
is not only a big departure for me, it feels like a big leap as well. It’s a far more sweeping story with a larger cast of characters than I’ve ever tackled before, and has a greater scope in terms of time and place. It’s also (if I’m allowed to say this) much funnier.

Tell us a little bit about Ed and Hugh, who meet at Harvard and become fast friends despite coming from such different backgrounds. What drew you to them as central characters, and what draws them to each other?

I’ve always been fascinated by distinct places and periods of time in which unlikely friendships are possible. This is true of ex-pats (which I explored a bit in
The Outside of August
) and it was certainly true of frontier living in the American West (which I explored in
The German Bride
).

Ed and Hugh become friends in a more prosaic way—going to college—but Harvard in the early 1960s has its considerable charms and challenges. Ed is working-class Jewish from Dorchester and Hugh is a Boston Brahmin. Class and money and questions of identity certainly fuel their friendship, but more important is how both of them feel like outsiders. What happens to a bond like that over time? How much do their different backgrounds continue to matter?

My father attended Harvard in the late 1950s, and when I was in middle school he had his 25
^th
reunion. This was the first time I’d seen what’s known as Harvard’s Red Book, in which graduates write about what they’d done since graduation. As a seventh grader, I read it cover to cover; and what always stayed with me was how wildly different all their lives had turned out. The Red Book, in all its mystery, inserted itself into my imagination and I suppose it never left.

What is their relationship to Helen, and how would you describe her?

Without giving too much away: Hugh and Helen are in love. They’re from a similar world and share a similarly troubled response to that world. Ed is their appreciative audience… until he isn’t. To describe Helen is to describe that beautiful woman you always notice just outside your orbit who seems frosty, unapproachable; but then you see a crack in her exterior—she’s lost her keys or you can tell she’s been crying. She’s vulnerable somehow. And now you cannot take your eyes off her—not because she’s beautiful, though that is certainly in the mix—but because of that surprising vulnerability.

Once they graduate, Hugh and Ed also embark on divergent career paths—Hugh battling disease by opening and operating clinics in Africa, Ed engaging in a very different kind of struggle in the go-go environment of Wall Street. Did you do any special research into these areas?

Yes, I did a great deal of research. That was one of the pleasures (and difficulties) of writing this book.

The most indispensable research was conversation. What a privilege to be able to sit down with smart people in vastly different fields who were not only open to questions but also able to offer spontaneous, genuine answers.

To give you an example: I went to high school with an extraordinary woman, Dr. Amy Lehman. She is dedicating her life to creating a floating health clinic on Lake Tanganyika, bringing care and support to the large rural lakeside population. When I learned what she was doing, I couldn’t get her out of my mind. I read up on her process and sought her out, and her project—however loosely—made its way into my story.

A DUAL INHERITANCE is a cross-generational novel, opening in 1963 and continuing up until the present day. What pivotal cultural moments do Hugh and Ed experience?

The Kennedy assassinations, the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement, Watergate—Ed and Hugh live through all of this, but these events aren’t big parts of the novel. A big influence for Hugh is Pan Africanism and the political idealism of the late 1960’s, while Ed is specifically affected by the phenomenon of White flight in Boston, Wall Street’s boom and the stock-market crash of 1987.

How do issues of race and class figure in the novel, and in what ways do Hugh and Ed’s daughters, Rebecca and Vivi, speak to shifting norms and sensibilities?

Ed is Jewish, working class; Hugh hails from a prominent WASP family. These differences lend a spark to their friendship—a spark that borders on true tension. Each man is so evidently a product of his background, and yet, in their own ways, they’re both eager to escape their respective worlds; their trajectories reflect that desire. It’s through their children that we see how Ed and Hugh’s choices have created new freedoms but also new challenges. America’s ruling class has expanded;, it’s not quite so obviously class-conscious, racist and anti-Semitic as it was once upon a time in New England, but there are new legacies that emerge—different kinds of guilt, different kinds of privilege—and new legacies present new challenges.

A DUAL INHERITANCE takes us around the globe, from the exclusive enclaves of Fisher’s Island to the bush of Tanzania, from the beaches of Haiti to the industrial anonymity of Shenzhen. Do you have a favorite location? If so, what and why?

Oh what an impossible question! I will say that I wouldn’t mind spending a summer in East Hampton…in 1963. Each location is beloved, though (as much as I loved writing about it) I doubt I’d want to beam myself to Shenzhen in the late 1980s.

What’s next for Joanna Hershon?

I just recorded a short essay for NPR and I tend to explore shorter forms between long (equally delicious and painful) stretches of novel-writing, so I’m looking forward to seeing what emerges!

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