The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham consists of seven associated stories which are all called “The News from Spain”.There’s an opening quote from Robert Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony…in diverging stories, all others are reflected. And there’s a wonderful conditional conversation that closes the first story, where Wickersham outlines a whole dialogue, laden with significance, that might have took place but didn’t.
Susanne and John are heading to a motel at Plum Point on Long Island. Wickersham iterates the name of the motel. It’s called The Sands of Time but it could just as well be called several other motel-like names which she offers. Wickersham excels in hypothetical thinking! And in her hypotheticals, you sense the craft of fiction being created before your eyes, like smoke exhaled. It’s writing which is like catching smoke before it fades.
The couple is attending a summer party, one of those extravagant Long Island parties, that’s a build-up to a wedding of their friends, Barbara and Barnaby. Wickersham writes that Barbara is newly engaged at forty-six. I loved that touch which spurred me on with somewhat morbid curiosity. Storytelling is also a kind of gossip, isn’t it?
The overflow guests are booked into the motel. But here’s another oddity. Barnaby is booked into the overflow hotel as well, as if the groom was something of an afterthought.
Susanne and John arrive at their motel just before 4PM. Wickersham is wonderful in describing the atmosphere of an overused motel room. Well scrubbed but sticky. It’s the first time that John and Susanne have been away and alone together since John slept with the owner of the Chicago gallery where he was showing. Susanne found out because she found a printed email when she was looking for some paperwork and double-checked John’s wallet.
When Susanne had discovered the email printout, she confronted her husband as he got out of the shower. Wickersham writes that they turn the shower on again to muffle the sounds of Susanne almost yelling and John crying. It’s a fine touch that the husband is the cryer. And I loved the subtlety of almost yelling.
Wickersham has a brilliant understanding of how turning the pages facilitates storytelling. You are turning the pages in these character’s identities, unfolding them, layering the sense of who they are.
And she makes timing work for her as a writer. The discovery of the tryst, John’s only recorded infidelity in 26 years of marriage, occurred in April. The affair actually occurred two years before that. The summer party occurs in July. You feel the weight of consequence that’s between this pair who have been brooding for months over the burden on their marriage. And you feel the weight especially on Susanne, who now views the past two years of her marriage from a radically altered perspective.
The other pair we care about are Barbara and Barnaby. Barbara sequesters Susanne at the party and talks (amazingly) about an old boyfriend, Vikram, the one who got away. You sense that Vikram was the ultimate creep in Wickersham’s view as if the writer had taken up the pen of Henry James.
Vikram played along with Barbara’s attention, consumed her elaborate family dinners, without ever discouraging her or without ever accepting her. When Vikram moves back to England where he is an Oxford scholar, he marries another woman with whom he has been in a long engagement. And this is who Barbara is nostalgic about? Where is Barbara’s head? Wow.
Among the party people there are rumors that Barnaby is gay. But Barnaby isn’t gay. He’s just not that interested in sex and has hardly had a sexual encounter. He’s had women in his life but when they get nowhere with him, they drift away. When Barbara and Barnaby have shared a bedroom at her parent’s house, Barnaby tells Barbara that he’s tired. But Wickersham leaves you to wonder what he’s going to say after the wedding.
Barbara and Barnaby both feel it’s past time to get married. Barnaby is afraid both of being alone and unmarried and of being alone and married.
Susanne sits next to a drunk woman at the party who says that with Barbara’s two sisters married with children of their own, and not just with homes of their own, but establishments of their own…I loved that dig…that Barbara feels the compulsion to marry herself. Susanne is shocked by this blatant put-down of her friend by a stranger. It leads her to something of a recoil back to her husband, John.
Barbara is marrying into marriage. She is marrying a blank. It’s as if when she stares at her husband, she will see no face. But as Wickersham points out, the shock will come when the blank must be filled in. Barbara and Barnaby don’t know each other very well. Barnaby was always the extra man at those dinner parties where Vikram was the center of attention. So Barbara is marrying the extra man.
The News from Spain by Joan Wickersham is subtitled Seven Variations on a Love Story. It pubs in October from Knopf. If readers would love a contemporary equivalent of the emotional subtleties of Henry James and Edith Wharton, then they will love this collection.
