The Broken Heart at Work

Jean Hanff Korelitz has written the romantic comedy she always wanted to read.

By: Jillian Kalonick

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TIMEOFF/FRANK WOJCIECHOWSKI
"My mother used to call me and say, ‘Are there any nice people in this novel?’ and I’d say no," says Jean Hanff Korelitz. "Everybody was horrible, including the heroine."


   When Jean Hanff Korelitz got the idea for her newest novel, The White Rose (Miramax, $24.95), she was in the middle of working on a book she hated.
   "I only get one idea at a time so I didn’t want to give it up," says Ms. Korelitz. "I had about 70 pages. My mother used to call me and say, ‘Are there any nice people in this novel?’ and I’d say no. Everybody was horrible, including the heroine."
   After Sept. 11, Ms. Korelitz realized she wanted to be working on a book that had characters she actually liked. "I wasn’t personally affected by (Sept. 11) but I was sad," she says. "Everybody was sad. I noticed the books I was reading at the time were the book equivalent of comfort food — they were novels in which people didn’t have too many problems, people were very kind. There was enough misery and sadness out there and I think I just wanted to be with kind people in my fictional life."
   Ms. Korelitz began to revisit her idea for a novel based on Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier, which some 20 years before had been, for her, an example of art imitating life.

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   "When I was 21 and at Cambridge University, I had a pathetically stupid love affair with this man who was simultaneously involved with a much older woman," she says. "It was a very stupid thing to do, I ended up with my heart on the train tracks. Someone said to me, ‘It’s just like that opera.’
   "I had never heard of ‘Der Rosenkavalier,’" she continues, "but, by strange coincidence, there was a production of that opera in London at the time, and I just fell in love with it… It’s incredibly funny, it’s incredibly sad, it’s everything you want in one little package."
   Ms. Korelitz decided to update the opera by setting it in modern-day, affluent Manhattan. She will read from the resulting novel, The White Rose, at Princeton Public Library Feb. 8.
   In the book, 48-year-old Marian Kahn, a professor at Columbia University and a very successful author, falls in love with a 26-year-old man — not so unheard of in the age of Demi Moore and Ashton Kutcher, but Marian is married and Oliver is her best friend’s son. Marian discoverers her cousin Barton is engaged to Sophie, an heiress and student in Marian’s department. When Oliver meets Sophie, their relationships become entangled. The novel is a sexy romantic comedy, but also tackles the deeper issues of class, wealth and aging.
   The opera, which at times falls into farce, proved difficult to translate directly into a novel. "I never forced myself to stick to the plot of the opera," says Ms. Korelitz. "I would say the novel is 20 percent the opera and the rest is me… There’s a lot of crossdressing, the whole final sequence of chapters has classical farce elements — people opening and slamming doors. This was not working on the page, every time I rewrote the chapters, I took another character out — making those farcical elements work was the most challenging thing about doing this."
   She also found she had to change the characters a bit. "In the opera, the middle-aged Marschallin is 32 — I find 32 unacceptable as a middle-age number, so she became a 48-year-old professor of history." In setting the novel among New York City’s elite, Ms. Korelitz was able to draw from her own experiences growing up in Manhattan.
   "I grew up in an affluent Jewish community, everyone was liberal, everyone was well off," she says. "Among the people I grew up with there was definite awareness of privilege and what was owed because of that privilege… that kind of comfortable, worldly, liberal guilty milieu was something that I was very familiar with."
   Ms. Korelitz, who lives in Griggstown with her husband, Paul Muldoon, and their son and daughter, is also the author of the novels The Sabbathday River and A Jury of Her Peers and a young adult novel, Interference Powder. After the work that went into The White Rose, she plans to do something lighter and work on another young-adult book, a genre she sees as very relevant at the moment.
   "What my kids fail to recognize is that they’re living in a golden age of children’s literature," she says. "Lemony Snicket, J.K. Rowling — these are absolutely fabulous books for the ages. I think this generation of readers is so fortunate, they’re the ones that are going to be reading each Harry Potter books as it comes out… it’s a very exciting time."
   Ms. Korelitz calls The White Rose "absolutely the book I wanted to write, and for what it’s worth exactly the kind of book I like most to read.
   "It was bittersweet," she continues. "It’s about aging and the things you give up, but first doing no harm and treating the people you live with with kindness. These are sentiments we can all have a little more of."
Jean Hanff Korelitz will read from and sign copies of The White Rose at Princeton Public Library, 65 Witherspoon St., Princeton, Feb. 8, 7:30 p.m. The reading is part of the Caroline Llewellyn Champlin Writers Talking Series. For information, call (609) 924-9529. On the Web: www.princetonlibrary.org