There are a million books about women being cheated on, lied to, heartbroken, and gaslit; it was fascinating to read the male perspective. Especially one authored by such a skilled writer. It made me wonder why this is such an anomaly, and I think that has to do with Josh Barkan's incredible pairing of insight and honesty. The names have been changed to protect the cheaters etc but 39-yr old Josh's wife Luciana met Mohammed on a 6-month vacation she took alone, away from her husband she'd been with 15 years, came home and told all her friends about it, rather than communicating with Josh. In Diane Vaughan's 1990 book Uncoupling explains, there is often an instigator who checks out of the relationship unbeknownst to the partner, in my case years before they actually start cheating. Thus the instigator goes through the emotional upheaval alone ahead of time, or compartmentalizes it, leaving the partner in a state of shock, scrambling around in a humiliating effort to salvage the relationship they don't realize had ended long ago.

While my sister was going through her three year divorce (stalled by Covid) she kept a letter to her ex, that she added to every time he pissed her off. Rather than discussing each complaint with mediators and lawyers and adding to their steadily mounting expenses, she waited until their day in court it hand it off to him, unburdening herself in a meaningful way that paved the way for healing and regrowth. Wonder Travels as an outsized version of that letter, so profoundly public, and growing in volume and audience, in such a way that I can only stand and applaud in awe. I love the poetic justice in Barkan applying his brilliant talents against his incommunicative instigator, who is so profoundly lacking in that particular area. Cheaters suck and comeuppance is awesome.

Additionally, Barkan has an enormous appreciation for nature and culture, and has lived in many different parts of the world, as a result Wonder Travels is an absolutely gorgeous travelogue. Through this book I eagerly relived trips and stints through Morocco, Oaxaca, NYC, Rome.

If you’re of a certain age, you’ll no doubt remember that iconic line from the book and film Love Story when Ali MacGraw, through tears, tells Ryan O’Neill “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Well, apparently, having an extramarital love affair and rejecting your husband also means never having to say you’re sorry. Or so Luciana, the author’s ex-wife, seems to think. In this emotionally painful but also cringe-worthy And when Luciana won’t tell her husband that she’s sorry for that affair, it drives Barkan off the deep end—and this memoir is an attempt to take all of us with him.

The reader knows something is up in Barkan’s marriage from the moment we’re told Luciana is on a six-month journey overseas—alone. Then she becomes incommunicado. Hmm, doesn’t sound good and it’s not. Barkan soon learns that Luciana is infatuated with a tour guide from Morocco.

Barkan, living in New York, can’t believe it but soon begins talking to all the couple’s mutual friends. It seems Luciana, who comes off in the book as juvenile and incredibly self-absorbed, has told everyone except her husband of 13 years what’s going on.

When she returns, she wants out of the marriage and their cramped apartment as fast as she can. Barkan wants to repair things for awhile but when he realizes how unrepentant Luciana is, even he concedes that the marriage is over.

Luciana, of Spanish descent, goes quietly but not without getting in a couple of shots. “He’s a real Muslim,” she tells Barkan of Mody the Moroccan. Then advises: “I think next time you should be with someone Jewish.”

Soon enough, Barkan sells the apartment, files for divorce, and heads out on his Wonder Travels, the name of the book. It’s more like a Lick Your Wounds Tour as he heads from El Paso to Madrid to Morocco to Rome to understand what went wrong and how. Certainly, one sympathizes with Barkan to an extent.

But his journey is just not that interesting and one begins to have some understanding of Luciana as well.memoir, Josh Barkan lays out the story of his former wife’s love affair with a Moroccan stud by nickname of Mody.
Barkan goes into excruciating and boring detail about his life and the women he dates. Not much is left to the imagination even when the writing is so embarrassing that a 14-year-old boy might have better judgement. When he meets a Mexican woman with big breasts, Barkan writes: “I have to admit I sucked on her nipples some. There was something primal about that, and maybe every man is an infant when around breasts.”

And maybe some men have the good sense to not write sentences like that. Perhaps Barkan’s pride was still wounded when he wrote that because he also goes out of his way several times to let the reader know that women find him attractive.

Barkan is the sort of new age, metro man you can’t imagine watching a football game without wincing at the violent contact. He almost brags about the number of times he can’t get an erection. And he seems to want to connect with women on a nerdy, lonely teenage boy level: “I can tell she shares the same reverence for museums I do.”

Hot stuff.

As painful as most of this is to read, Barkan is leading us somewhere. He embarks on a trip to confront Mody the Moroccan about his affair with Barkan’s ex-wife. That has promise, and the reader is eager to witness the confrontation. Luciana is no longer with Mody, but Barkan wants to see the tour guide mano-a-mano to make sense of the affair.
Will they physically fight, raise their voices, make a scene? It would be wrong to reveal how their meeting plays out, but let’s just say Barkan has met his Moroccan match, and they part ways with a hearty handshake.

I got a preview copy of this book through NetGalley because the story sounded pretty crazy: the author's wife cheats on him in Morocco, and a couple of years later he travels there to confront the man she slept with. And I don't know, the book might actually reach crazy at some point, but try as I might, I just couldn't muster the patience to get to that point. I gave up at almost exactly the halfway point.

In the first third of the book, Barkan recounts the events that led to his divorce and what happened immediately after... in MINUTE detail. What clothes he wears, what he orders at a coffee shop, how many drinks he has, what this friend says, what that neighbor says, etc. I empathize with the guy's pain, I really do, and his (ex) wife does sound like a piece of work, but reading his account felt like being buttonholed at a party by an acquaintance who won't stop talking about himself. Even in the very brief moment he tries to see the situation from his wife's point of view, he just recounts the same things he has been saying, only in the third person.

As Barkan nears the official divorce he finally goes out on some unsatisfying dates and has some brief flings in which he reveals some unsavory thoughts about the women he encounters. I'll give him credit for not sparing himself in these descriptions, but the accounts never rise above self-indulgence.

Barkan then travels to Mexico, where he meets a wonderful woman who nurtures him back into normalcy (although I guess not fully, since he will still end up going to Morocco!). I reached the end of my patience when he takes this new woman to a luxury restaurant and it starts raining heavily while they're sitting outdoors. He describes the waiters getting soaked as they rush to set up awnings to protect him and his date, and he thinks to himself that these servants don't mind getting wet because they're joining in the happiness the couple is feeling at that moment. And that's when I realized that, like the waiters, I too was indulging a man who can only think of himself, and I put the book down for good.

Loved hearing about the travels and his marriage, would have liked an update!
Thanks to author, publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this book. While I got the book for free it had no bearing on the rating I gave it.