Have You Read the News From Spain?

The News from Spain: 7 Variations on a Love Story by Joan Wickersham
Reviewed by: Julie W.

The news from Spain is that her husband is dead. His race car spun out and hit a tree.

A bomb’s gone off under a park bench.

The news from Spain is what you haven’t even heard yet – that your Johnny has had more lovers than anyone can count.

The news from Spain is the quiet rush in the seashell held up to your ear, the “urgent tumbling whispering roar” you listen to sitting on the sand beside a man who is not your husband.

The news from Spain does not change:

“A and I still work together. There’s nothing new to report. Things happen: half declarations, cautious withdrawals, sudden flare-ups, gradual repairs. It reminds me of that old late-night comedy bit, repeated every Saturday night: The news from Spain this week is that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.”

The News from Spain: 7 Variations On a Love Story is a new collection from Joan Wickersham, and it is wonderful.

Wickersham’s thread – this poetic “news from Spain” – turns up in each story. The news is heartbreak, or it is hope; it is welcomed or it is mocked:

“The news from Spain. Oh, dear God, “the news from Spain”! Spoken in that deep ponderous undertaker voice. The unctuous importance of it, as if he were saying: The news from Hiroshima. The news from Dallas. Lighten Up, Charlie, she felt like telling him.”

Through this small phrase we’re opened up to those Variations On a Love Story promised in the title. Wickersham explores all variety of intimacy – between lovers, spouses, friends; coworkers whose affection is long unspoken; between a paralyzed woman and her caretaker; between the reader and characters. At times it feels like reading between the lines of someone’s diary, all the history and murmurings a person keeps to oneself.

And there is betrayal, too, plenty of it.

The collection opens with a wedding. Two of the guests, a husband and wife, are away together for the first time since he admitted an infidelity. We meet the bride and groom, both middle-aged, and learn that they weren’t so much struck by Cupid’s arrow as they are walking along inside its shadow, careful not to look one another in the eye for fear that even that faint shadow of affection will disappear.

Will the husband and wife mend their bond? Will the bride and groom find each other in marriage? We don’t know. Wickersham doesn’t tell us. It’s this aspect of the stories, their refusal to sum themselves up in pat explanations of why we do what we do, why we cheat and love and cheat again; why satisfaction is so elusive; why hearts can be so very hard to work with, that made me fall head over heels for this book.

The news from Spain is different for everyone. Sometimes it is what the characters need to hear; sometimes what they don’t want to hear at all. But ultimately, the news sings the same theme: we reach out, we intertwine, we pull apart and come together again (though perhaps with someone unexpected). We keep lifting the seashell to hear the rush of our own beating hearts echo in our ears again and again and again.

I simply loved this collection. Wickersham breaks deep into the human heart, all its mess and wonder. This is short fiction at its finest.

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Copies of The News From Spain are available on our shelves and via bookpeople.com.