The News from Spain

August 20, 2012
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.

September 15, 2012
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.

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May 1, 2012

Astute readers will know Wickersham as the author of National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index and will have seen her short fiction in Best American Short Stories. This theme-and-variation collection swirls across the globe and over centuries. The book on this list I'm most curious to see; with a reading group guide.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 1, 2012
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 herea child for a parent, a wife for a cheating husband or a lover, an aide for his chargebut 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)