The Divorce

by Moa Herngren

translated by Alice Menzies

One of the most amazing things happened a few days after I finished reading The Divorce—none of the pull quotes I prepared felt like they meant anything.

I mark out sections while I am reading that strike me as poignant or important or representational and then I manually type them into google drive. This began as a way to get the feel for how individual authors construct their sentences—I thought it might help me, a kind of shadowboxing for writing—and I continue double-transcribing them more out of habit than anything else (having to type everything out once into my notes and a second time into the essay itself also creates a small hurdle to just pulling out massive blocks of text). Rarely do I have a plan for these excerpts when I find them, nor do I tend to write down my own ideas while I am still reading.

When not embedded within the pages of The Divorce, the high-tension sequences between Bea and Niklas I excerpted didn’t really seem all that high. None of it matters, out of context, though not in a way that makes the book not matter. In fact, realizing that their divorce doesn’t really matter is likely why it matters:

Nikolas tries to imagine what kind of disaster she means. What happened last night was a disaster. The so-called medical care being administered from a bunch of shipping containers outside of Msambewni–that is a distaster.

“Could you give the delivery company a call, too?”

Watching the characters realize that their actual dramatic conflicts are quite inconsequential is rather amazing.

When the book ended, I was sad to see everyone go. Watching them all felt like being near friends, and it didn’t hurt that I recognized reflections of their hearts within my own:

But does he actually enjoy being a doctor? Is it exciting? Or is it mostly boredom mixed with the constant dread of making a terrbile mistake and having someone’s life on your conscience–a fear that has come true more than once, though Lovisa’s death is the one that troubles him most. In his new job at Sophiahemmet, he is trapped in a meat grinder of stress and responsibility, and no matter how fast he runs or how hard he works, he will never be able to escape. Some days are calmer than others, but only just.

Imagine if there is a way out after all? If he really could do something different with his life? What would that be? How would it feel? He has butterflies in his stomach, though not from anxiety; this is more a giddy feeling. A hopeful breeze, carrying the memory of something distant, from back when he was still young and curious. Hungry. Could he really do something just because he wants to do it, for his own sake?

Sub out doctor and stuff in attorney, make the lives you have in your hands representational rather than literal, and there I am, back in a courtroom in 2012. I had the desperation—which was often mistaken for courage—at the age of 29; could I have done it at 50? To flounder, with a home and a wife and children? It is extraordinary to look at the choices you’ve made, in how you’ve built your life, and recognize that most of them were made to fit to expectations of others–a parent who wanted you to have “marketable skills” or a “stable career” –rather than your own idea of what happiness looked like.

Bea’s new neighborhood. That’s what it is, but it still feels surreal, like she is on a brief sojourn in some far-flung country.

—-

Emerging from Karlaplan Station forty-five minutes later, Bea feels like she can finally relax, as though she has just returned from a long trip abroad…She sets off along Karlavägen, toward the Red Cross office. Toward the crossing with Banérgatan and her old home. It could be any other day, as though she has just left the apartment and is making her way to work.

I remember this feeling, after being exiled [dramatic hyperbole] from my Upper East Side Manhattan apartment, sent off to the edges of my old neighborhood in Astoria, Queens to crash in a friend’s spare room. I was the partner with the lower-paying job, the replaced one that couldn’t keep the apartment alone and so had to leave. It was hard to go back, hard to see what used to be a part of my life—unhappy as it was—closed off to me.

You might be able to decipher people who are secure in their marriages because they (read: me) are so into books about marriages that go sideways (My Husband; The Divorce). Or maybe that’s a sign that someone is really nervous about their marital bond; are they looking for advice, or to alleviate some of their feeling of estrangement by watching others go through it? Perhaps that’s part of a horseshoe theory where the two dipoles wrap back around to meet at the “books about marriages that are going through a weird phase” point—happy or unhappy, the only people who don’t want marriage books are those neutral on the concept. I don’t think so, though. I don’t think I could have read about Bea making Niklas miserable, about Niklas making Bea feel small, about their inherent lack of compatibility, and not have felt suffocated were I was still in a relationship that felt unhappy in similar ways.

The Divorce makes it pretty clear that Bea and Niklas do not belong together, and the specifics of that conclusion is my one real qualm about the story. I would have preferred a less clear, and thus perhaps less clichéd, presentation of Jacob—Bea’s sibling and Niklas’ erstwhile best friend—whose suicide was the meetcute for our future divorcees. They both come with intense baggage: Bea with her unmoored loneliness and Niklas with his self-abnegating sense of duty, gloming together into a pair unsuited to support each other in any way other than through conventional familial obligation. But the genesis for Niklas’ sense of guilt—strong enough that would end with him married to his dead best friend’s sister—is revealed to be a sort of unrequited gay love. It felt, well, one-note. Jacob is reduced to a caricatured closeted teen that cannot handle their own sexuality and, spurned by their heteronormative best mate, ends up drowning himself. It’s not as impactful, to me, as leaving Bea and Niklas as a possibility for anyone—the way the story is structured, there’s no threat of your marriage collapsing if you didn’t marry someone you felt more obligation to than love for due to a Rube Goldbergian series of interpersonal events.

Outside of that one misstep, the book deftly conveys so many aspects of romantic incompatibility so perfectly. It nailed one of my largest fears, both of experiencing or of inflicting:

“No, I just had a sudden pain in my head.”

“Maybe it’s because you go running so much? It’s not good for you, you know.”

“I haven’t been running in months.”

“Which is why you should probably take it easy.”

The whole, “Whatever it is you do that is just for you—in this case, running, but it could be yoga or drinks with a friend or volunteer work—is wrong because it is for yourself not our family unit, thus no matter how your phrase it, you did it wrong” is a nightmare scenario. Personally, as someone who runs for hours each week, it does feel selfish sometimes to be that far removed from the family unit for that long. But oh boy would I be super bummed out if my partner tried to guilt me out of running by pretending it was in my best interest, physically, not to run.

I think you could enjoy The Divorce if you weren’t married. I don’t think you could enjoy it if you were married unhappily. Unless it gave you the kick to get over the line and split up, that is. But that wouldn’t be a case of enjoyment, but one of necessity:

She puts her phone down and pauses to see how she feels. It’s a bit like falling off a bike, she thinks, trying to work out whether there are any broken bones before you dare move.

As the book gamely—but necessarily—concludes, sometimes falling off the bike is the best thing that can happen. Still always going to hurt, though.