It’s worthwhile to engage a film or story that’s emotionally difficult. For years I avoided John Ford’s 1940 film version of The Grapes of Wrath. When I finally saw it recently from start to finish I was so touched, and so encouraged that I was willing to undertake it. To watch someone’s home being plowed under because they couldn’t afford to pay. Being close to reality in a story wakes you up.

Shortly after starting Joan Wickersham’s story that takes place in part in a nursing home, I ran the other way and closed the book. But then I went back. I think that one of the most terrible phrases in the American language is nursing home.

Rebecca about 45, is visiting her mother Harriet in her nursing home. Rebecca is about to realize her personal dream of opening an indie bookstore in Boston. Her mother is laid up in Connecticut, about two hours away.

Rebecca has suggested that her mother move closer but then there is Ralph. Ralph is another senior who lives in an assisted living apartment next door to the nursing home. Harriet and Ralph are close so Harriet won’t move.

Rebecca, in bed with Peter, wonders whether he is being kind to her now so he can strategically unmask his basic selfishness later. Peter assures her that it’s okay if she doesn’t want to have sex. Rebecca is still in recovery two years after her divorce from Steve.

Peter is being nice. Maybe the problem with Peter is that he is too nice. Rebecca needs reassurance. But there is a lack of intensity in her relationship with Peter that can be put on his side of the balance sheet.

The tipping point is a book acknowledgement. Now that’s creative thinking from Wickersham. I’ve already noticed that Joan Wickersham deftly puts supporting characters in play that function as torches of illumination on her key characters.

But having a relationship jump the shark over a book acknowledgement is a sleek literary device. Joan Wickersham, in the seven News from Spain stories, binds her characters together with cords of exquisite literary silk, utterly soft and strong.

If you know that you’re appearing in a book acknowledgement, you are wide open to wondering how you are presenting yourself. It’s like you are looking at a mirror of print that may contour shadows behind your image. For most of us, being in an acknowledgement is the only way our names are going to appear in print.

Peter teaches architectural history. He has written a book on architect H. H. Richardson. How does Peter characterize the woman he is sleeping with in the acknowledgement? The word that jumps out at Rebecca is pleasant as in: all those pleasant times with.

I loved Rebecca on the brink. The words are hanging fire in her mouth. All that you can come up with for me is “pleasant”? She knows she shouldn’t bring it up. She’s going to criticize the writer for the acknowledgement section of his book.

This second iteration of The News from Spain is an indie bookstore lover’s story. Have you ever worked in a bookstore and had a customer try to pick you up? Have you ever, throwing caution and your job to the winds, tried to pick a customer up? As Rebecca discovers, your friends could have seen this coming. It’s a very effective way for Wickersham to extend her story and our understanding of Rebecca.

Someday you’ll need someone to speak up for you. This is a truth you may find inconvenient to comprehend. Harriet’s lying in her bed in the nursing home and she wants to use the bedpan. But the help staff are too busy so they tell Harriet to shit in her bed and they will clean up the mess afterward.

Harriet does as she’s told but no one comes to clean up the mess. So Harriet is lying in her own excrement with no one to help her out of it.

Harriet reluctantly phones Rebecca who lobbies the staff with return phone calls until a phalanx of helpers arrives at her mother’s bedside. Throughout the story Harriet is battered by near countless infections that aren’t caught in time to prevent needless suffering. Rebecca has a life bent out of shape by her mother’s mortality, which threatens to swallow up her own imperfect attempts to construct a life.

Call Peter, Rebecca.

The News from Spain, a collection of seven segued stories by Joan Wickersham, will be published by Knopf on October 11th, 2012.