Divorce is in the Air
-
- £8.99
-
- £8.99
Publisher Description
Joan-Marc’s out of work, he’s alone, he has a heart condition, his mother’s addicted to pills, he can’t stand his sister. Otherwise, life is beautiful.
And there’s a lot that his estranged second wife doesn’t know about him. But in Divorce is in the Air he now sets out to tell her. He begins with the failure of his first marriage, describing a holiday taken in a last-ditch attempt to salvage a once passionate relationship.
Recalling this ill-fated trip triggers a life-story’s worth of flashbacks. From pivotal childhood scenes – his earliest sexual encounters, his father’s suicide – he moves on through the years, hopscotching between Barcelona and Madrid, describing a life of indulgence and of appetites.
The result is an unapologetic, daring, acerbic novel by an electrifying young writer about love and the end of love, and how hard it can be to let go.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In his American debut, Torn 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 clich s. 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. Torn 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.
