Review by New York Times Review
"A LOVE story," one of Joan Wickersham's narrators insists, "can never be accurately reported, only imagined. It is all dreams and invention." This type of imperfect conjuring proves hazardous to Wickersham's characters, who are mostly women, middle-aged and beyond. "The News From Spain: Seven Variations on a Love Story" (Wickersham's first collection, following a novel and an acclaimed memoir, "The Suicide Index") is an ode to heartbreak and regret, as well as to the unbidden intimacy that can emerge not only between friends but between strangers. Wickersham's gift is for capturing the habits of mind that lead even smart people to deceive themselves, make poor choices, slide into affairs or marriages that have little chance of succeeding. As much as love, her characters long for affirmation, eager as they are to see themselves in another's eyes as desirable and desired. Thus one of two girls at an otherwise all-male school chooses to play the stand-up bass ("another embarrassment: to play an instrument that looked like you") and falls for a boy in her rock band, only to wonder later if he was involved with her favorite teacher. Elsewhere a paralyzed ballet dancer, married to an unfaithful choreographer, finds tenderness in the touch of a caregiver. Another wife, having discovered her husband's affair, worries about how easily she and he are falling, nevertheless, back into stride. Wickersham adroitly mines the small moments around which relationships shift, the places where love begins or ends or falls into that troubling middle ground that haunts sleepless nights. The stories span a wide range of places and time periods. Among the heartbroken are Eleanor Roosevelt, Mozart and four racecar drivers from the 1960s. The first lady falls for her doctor, a man with "a fine, serious face . . . not just a good doctor, a good man." "'It's late, you should sleep,' they murmur to each other sometimes, after a silence, but they don't sleep. By the time they come down in Newfoundland in the gray morning, they have told each other everything." Each of these stories is entitled "The News From Spain," although none take place in that country. In one the news is of a husband's death, in others it's the "whispering roar" from a seashell, Basque bombings on a nursing home TV, a lesson in a high school Spanish class, the cheerful confirmation of an affair. The book holds together so well thematically that the repetition of the title phrase can feel like an unnecessary contrivance. Some of the most insightful moments here are the ones in which lonely people find connection in surprising places: a journalist brings his wife to an interview, and when he leaves them alone his wife and the interview subject share a troubling secret. Wickersham is equally adept at capturing the resentment that can lie beneath the polite conversation of longtime friends. Before agreeing to a small errand, one character reviews her entire relationship with the woman doing the asking. Saying no, she determines, would propel a pinball that might ricochet and bounce off "a series of moods and obligations and generous acts and small stored resentments and moments of gratitude and ingratitude." Occasionally Wickersham overindulges her characters' desire to pick at small hurts - you may find yourself needing a break. Fortunately, she often provides this by switching perspective or dropping into a parallel story line. Cumulatively her book makes you slow down and listen, and then watch for people to reveal themselves. One narrator is so attuned to gesture that she plans her own in advance. Driving by her husband's favorite clam shack - only to dine at a lousy one - she is annoyed at his silence "because it deprived her of her chance to shrug coldly." At the engagement party of a doomed couple, Wickersham has the orchestra playing "I've Got You Under My Skin." Which to my ear seems a perfect way to characterize this collection. In one of these stories, the 'news from Spain' is a husbands death. In another, its confirmation of an affair. Tom Barbash is the author of a novel, "The Last Good Chance," and a forthcoming story collection, "Stay Up With Me."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 3, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
The impish recurrence of a phrase, the news from Spain, links these seven stories, appearing in them in widely varying ways. It is a reminder of their deeper cohesion. Though they jump from eighteenth-century Prague to New York in the 1940s and feature a race-car driver, a teenaged girl, and a middle-aged bride, they make a similar point: love is flawed, uneven, and impossible to pin down. There is love in all forms here a child for a parent, a wife for a cheating husband or a lover, an aide for his charge but it never runs smoothly. Wickersham asserts, through a character, that love stories are dreams and invention . . . guesswork. By presenting the blind enthusiasm of a crush and later its disillusionment, the sad realization of loving more or less than a partner, and the distorting pull of differing needs and obligations in a relationship, she demonstrates how biased and baseless narratives of love can be. Characters tell themselves stories of passion or betrayal, and readers see the reality of their frail, imperfect emotional faculties.--Kinney, Meg Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Subtitled, "Seven Variations on a Love Story," each of the seven stories in this uneven collection is titled "The News from Spain" and makes ingenious use of that phrase somewhere in the narrative. A mother consigned to a nursing home and her adult daughter engage in an intricate dance of filial obligation after the mother's condition improves. At an all-boys school, a lone female student, 13, develops a friendship with her married Spanish teacher whose secret extracurricular activities will in time bring tragedy to the school. While being interviewed for a biography, the elderly widow of a long-dead race car driver is shocked by a confession from the biographer's wife. A married woman, for the amusement of a co-worker with whom she's in love, invents a story about a WWII-era doctor's relationship with two women. Although the stories are written with intelligence and acutely observed, some have overcomplicated framing devices, and there's not much variation throughout, making the concept feel more like a gimmick than a conceit that illuminates the characters' attempts to connect in a world of hidden desires. Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt & Hochman. (Oct. 11) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Intriguingly, this collection and the seven stories within it all share the same title, but locale is not what links them-in one story, set in a boarding school, the phrase is merely a Spanish teacher's tagline. Rather, the stories all are poignant and insightful, dealing with age, infirmity, and loss, or with love occurring late in life. The protagonists are mature women of independent means, who've led cultured, interesting lives, or they are younger persons whom we see from the vantage point of later life. Wickersham is as skilled as Alice Munro in maneuvering her characters, and the reader, through time. Characters and situations are revealed almost offhandedly, through conversation or minor revelation, or perhaps not at all. In one of the collection's best, we never learn exactly why a former star ballerina is now confined to a wheelchair, but we see intimately how immobility circumscribes her life. VERDICT Highly recommended for fans of modern short fiction.-Reba Leiding, James Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Elegantly structured, emotionally compelling fiction from novelist/memoirist Wickersham (The Suicide Index, 2008, etc.). The seven pieces here tell seven different stories, though each has the same title. "The News from Spain" is also a touchstone phrase in each, its meaning transformed by the characters' experiences. In the first tale, a woman whose longtime marriage has been rocked by a single infidelity sits on the beach with her friend, a man marrying for companionship and hoping his bride-to-be doesn't want sex; they listen to "the news from Spain" roaring in a seashell, a recollection of simpler times. The phrase encapsulates a daughter's discovery of her profound love for her dying mother; the excitement a teacher brings into a student's life; betrayal, tragedy and the eternal sameness amid varieties of love. Four pieces are pure fiction, but Wickersham is particularly interesting when she rings changes on history. A very long tale insightfully examines the real-life marriage of choreographer George Balanchine and ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, stricken by polio and forced to accept her husband's unfaithfulness; but it is just as nuanced and shrewd about Le Clercq's relationship with her gay caregiver. The collection's best story imagines modern odysseys for the Countess in The Marriage of Figaro and Elvira from Don Giovanni, interpolating the memoirs of their creator, librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte; what could have been a gimmick is instead a beautiful meditation on art, love and friendship. The final piece is slightly bumpier as it interweaves memories of a platonic adultery that may or may not be fictional with the story of a New York doctor beloved by both a president's widow and a female journalist (unnamed, as were Balanchine and Le Clercq, but clearly Eleanor Roosevelt, Martha Gellhorn, and David Gurewitsch). Yet, here too Wickersham dissects the human heart with precision and restraint that make her work all the more moving. Short stories don't get much better than this, and for once, the overarching framework strengthens rather than dissipates their effectiveness.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
