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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