ISBN: 978-1-947980-21-1
June 2018 • 292 pp • Fiction
Cover Art: “I See You!!!” (2007), by Louise Bourgeois
Spuyten Duyvil
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Just Like That
Praise
In Just Like That, Barbara Henning’s compelling voice slips into gorgeous interiorities where we meet the oracular. She writes, “Sometimes I wondered whether I was writing the relationship or the relationship was writing the novel.” She then layers translucent maps on top of one another – the map of New York City and the map of the body’s systems – and what emerges is a cartography composed of radiant details able to project the signals of love and recovery.
—Selah Saterstrom
Barbara Henning’s latest novel, Just Like That, chronicles the ways in which traumatic experiences prescribe the patterns of one’s life. The push and pull of creative and destructive impulses propel Sara as she navigates the layered stories of her past and present, attempting to redraft her future with the man she loves. This memoiristic fiction investigates mercurial, meandering desire. Unblinklingly it stares into the complicated chambers of the human heart.
—Martine Bellen
In Just Like That, Barbara Henning creates a maze of longing—the lost object of desire, the pressure of a hand in the dark, the ghosts of everyone she has ever met roaming through the snowdrifts of a dream-like city. At the heart of the book are the questions we all ask: how close can you get to another person? What do you really know about anyone else? Can you ever wash out all the stains? Just Like That opens a door into a future which is already here, and where the elusive questions are all but unanswerable. Henning never stops trying—and this remarkable book is the ultimate account of what happens along the way.
—Lewis Warsh
Reviews
Barbara Henning’s new novel Just Like That charts with profound depth and sophistication the course of an interracial love affair.. . . Since it’s revealed early on that the affair ended badly, the reader approaches the story with the query: Where did things go wrong? And this is explored in the book in a searching, aching manner.. . . It is only among such people who construct lives outside of the bleakly conformist mainstream culture where a love affair can still be an adventure . . . Contrary to what my discussion may suggest, the novel is not a treatise but a passionately detailed chronicle; excruciatingly painful at times of conflict between the pair; vividly life-affirming at others when the couple achieve a temporary, joyful balance. The question posed at the beginning is never resolved; that’s not the point. What is at issue is that, as the reader sees the partnership unravel in all its complexity, is that a personal, sociological and historical tangle is illuminated in real time. As readers of other work of this author will know, Henning plays a game with no simplicity, no false simplicity, only a lucid depiction of life in all its fecundity with a sure gauge of the politics of the personal.
—Jim Feast, Gathering of the Tribes, September 4, 2018
Henning's Just Like That might initially be taken for a straightforward document of semi-fictionalized heterosexual romantic love from a female perspective. Such a characterization would so deeply diminish the affecting and effective deployment of a furiously cerebral rumination on love, passion, and the evanescent, mysterious quality of love and its attachment, past and present. Set in a quietly gentrifying New York City of the past decade, Henning's anti-fairy tale questions the motives and agency of partners embarking on a relationship, at times loving and so too fraught. The title of this book by a writer also well known poet is a clever misnomer: nothing happens "Just Like That" because love and living are difficult. Identity is difficult. These two books [Henning’s and Bernstein Sycamore's Sketchtasy] are vexed and complex, contemplating what identity is and can be. They are courageous and among the most forceful books I've read this decade.
—Jon Curley, “Sketching Ecstasy, Elegy and Selves . . . Just Like That.” Curley Blog, Feb 13, 2019
Andrea Jones Walker, Turning Leaves: Essays about Books and Reading, December 23, 2018.