Divorce Is in the Air

June 13, 2016
In his American debut, Torné tells the story of a divorced man who is down on his luck and looking back on what went wrong with the primary romantic relationship of his life. Joan-Marc writes to his second wife about his first wife, Helen, and the various ways the beautiful Helen affected him—and ruined him. The book is structured without chapter breaks and mostly in flashbacks about how Helen dressed down Joan-Marc’s masculinity, refused to work, and drank all day. Their fights are terrible, full of nasty violence, insults, and sexist clichés. Joan-Marc’s first-person narrative bounces between Madrid and Barcelona while he explains how smart he is, and how everyone loves him, and yet his first wife was not able to appreciate his genius or take care of him properly, though the sex was great. Between his father’s suicide and his mother’s mental illness, Joan-Marc, or “John” as the American Helen calls him, struggles to pull his life back together. Torné has a rich vocabulary, and he takes us into the mind of a miserable man, but readers may find him a less than compelling protagonist to follow.

Starred review from June 15, 2016
Nothing really happens outside the protagonist's head in this book, but the author's virtuosic command of voice sustains the narrative momentum.This English-language debut by a young Spanish novelist could have been titled Joan-Marc's Complaint, though the narrator doesn't share the masturbatory obsession of Philip Roth's hero. Yet he spews at length about his predicament in a soliloquy that extends past 300 pages and doesn't pause for chapter breaks or have extra spaces to separate one section from the next. He is savagely funny, sometimes intentionally but often not, and his faith in "the healing power of humor" does not lead to the solution he desires. But what does he desire? And who is he? What is plain from the outset is that the narrator's opinion of himself differs sharply from that of everyone else who enters his consciousness. The setup is that the narrator and his wife have come to a health spa at her instigation in order to heal their marriage. Accompanying them are her parents and a young boy, who must be the wife's son but whose relationship to the narrator remains mysterious. The narration will return to the spa from time to time, but the scope of memory widens as the protagonist reveals that he is writing (or speaking) to his second wife about his marriage to his first wife and how the two were very different but ended much the same way. Why? "It's the story of my life," he says. "Neither of you could ever recognize my obvious merits." To the contrary, one or both of his wives and the sister who despises him will, over the course of his tale, call him a homophobe, a repressed homosexual, a hypochondriac, a man who wants others to support him, and "a collection of missing pieces." As narrator and reader attempt to put that puzzle together, the narration becomes darker and deeper until the protagonist realizes just how alone he is and how old he has become. "Sometimes I have the feeling that no matter what I do, life is impossible," he says. "That's the only lesson to learn, the only one we don't want to learn."This novel should spark interest in Torne's previous two and anticipation for what's to come.

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July 1, 2016
Trying to tell one's estranged second wife about one's first is never an easy task, but for Joan-Marc, the peregrinations of his years spent bouncing between Barcelona and Madrid with his American wife, Helen, are an exorcised exercise in erotic sublimation and denial. Theirs was a relationship born of hormonal lust, one whose steaminess ran out of steam for reasons that are not quite clear. As Joan-Marc recalls the most intimate and sordid episodes of his life with Helen in prurient and precise detail, his scattered memories lead him to other places, other times and reintroduce him to other people whose influence played no small part in the demise of one marriage and the precariousness of another. In a muscular, nimble, and exuberant stream-of-consciousness flow reminiscent of the iconic master of the genre, David Foster Wallace, Torne offers a maniacally playful yet fiercely revelatory study of a man coming to grips with life's greatest joys and losses.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)