Tag: Moa Herngren

Miranda July vs Moa Herngren

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

Miranda July (the author of All Fours) is more artistically gifted than Moa Herngren (the author of The Divorce). Still, if you are in the mood for a novel about the midlife crisis, I’d recommend Herngren.

For one, The Divorce gives space to both female and male experience of being in their early fifties. Herngren decided not to follow the fashionable trend of turning male characters into props who sit around waiting, supportively and silently, while their wives thrash around menopausally, destroying everything in sight. Herngren’s depiction of the male middle-aged life weariness is nuanced, kind, and very realistic.

Another reason is that Herngren’s characters aren’t rich, clueless bastards. These are regular people who struggle to pay the mortgage and worry about money. Most people can’t just drop everything and start bed-hopping around the country when middle age hits because nobody is rich enough for that. Herngren writes about normal, everyday people, and that makes the book a lot more useful. Middle age is difficult, and The Divorce reads like a handbook of what can go wrong and how to prevent it.

Of course, if All Fours were a literary masterpiece, none of this would matter. But it’s not. There’s talent there but not remotely enough to justify choosing this novel over The Divorce.

I recommend The Divorce very highly, even though the author piles it on way too thick to make her characters as representative of their type as possible. Besides, I’m eager to discuss it, so if you’ve read it or are planning to read, please make yourself known.

Book Notes: Moa Herngren’s The Divorce

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

After 32 years of “daily arguments about gender roles”, Niklas walks out on his wife Bea. Instantly, Bea’s sense of simmering irritation with the man she perceives as in constant need of her guidance turns to concern. Yes, she’s annoyed that Niklas spends too much time at the hospital where he works as a doctor, even though his earnings allow her to “do something meaningful with her life” in a vanity job. But still, how dare he walk out and avoid doing the chores she assigned to him!

Bea hops on her bike and rides in search of the wayward Niklas. It does cross her mind that she should have brushed her teeth and combed her hair but she rejects the idea of making herself look good for her husband. Sweaty, stinky, in Birkenstocks over grubby socks, she confronts Niklas and is stunned by his refusal to scurry back home. I could have stopped reading right then because people who wear Birkenstocks over socks have nobody to blame when their marriages collapse but I’m very interested in the “wifely drama” genre.

Women use books like Moa Herngren’s The Divorce to run through all sorts of scenarios that can imperil a marriage and find solutions before a problem arises. “Husband suddenly walks out” is one of the favorite female scenarios to explore. Herngren makes it way too easy for her readers, though, offering up an image of such a sad excuse for a wife that one would have to try really hard to reach her level of marital uselessness. Bea’s inability to formulate a single sentence free of exasperation or demand is comical, and so is her shock at finding out that this approach doesn’t evoke deep sexual longing towards her in her husband.

Niklas is a piss poor husband, too, of course. He’s man enough to get himself a girlfriend but is so terrified of his wife that he fails to inform her of that fact for months, forcing the miserable, Birkenstocked Bea to beg him, again and again, to tell her why he isn’t living at home.

There are still some useful things one can pick up from The Divorce, though. For instance, Bea is shocked to discover that Niklas left her for Maria Axelsson, a woman with scented candles and animal-print cushions, whom Bea and Niklas had spent years ridiculing. Lesson 1: if a man spends years ridiculing some random woman, he likes her. She’s a source of danger, especially if she is armed with animal-print cushions and you wear sandals over socks and don’t use deodorant.

Lesson 2: telling a dude that you want him “to take initiative” by doing exactly what you want him to do while looking enthusiastic is not going to lead anyplace nice. When a man takes initiative, there’s a strong probability that you won’t always like how that looks, so don’t be a Bea and demand initiative when what you really want is slavish obedience.

I don’t know if we have any young, unmarried people around here but this novel is a veritable textbook on how to screw up a marriage. With anybody less beaten down than the miserable Niklas, it would take only a few years of Bea’s marriage-killing strategies to turn the relationship into a smouldering wreck. Read The Divorce and do the exact opposite if you want your marriage to thrive.

The novel is a lot of fun, people. Highly recommended, enjoyable, light reading that’s screaming fun. Read it in a day to get rid of the horrible aftertaste from Claudia Piñeiro’s The Time of the Flies, and the remedy worked.