~ Afterlife, by Julia Alvarez ~
Julia Alvarez writes wonderfully about Dominican immigrant families, and especially about the difficult, loving, annoying, funny parts of intra-family interactions. The bickering, affectionate relationship of her four first-generation immigrant sisters in How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents and its followup Yo! is simply charming, while also a lovely portrayal of Dominican/immigrant culture.
In her latest novel, AfterLife, too, there are four sisters, but here the sisters are middle-aged, and their concerns have shifted, appropriately.
The prologue of this novel is a simply lovely poem: it cannot be quoted here as it needs to be read in whole, but I mention it to encourage each reader to take their own time reading it.
Antonia, a middle sister, has lost her husband, Sam.
She is keeping to her routines, walking a narrow path through the loss — not allowing her thoughts to stray. Occasionally she takes sips of sorrow, afraid the big wave might wash her away. […] Countless times a day, and night, she pulls herself back from this edge.
She has also retired from her job as a professor. What will she do now? The sisters are immensely supportive.
Today it’s Tilly calling. A few days ago, Mona. Izzy weaves in and out. The sisterhood checking on her. You take her this morning. I’ll call her this weekend. The frequency has dropped off in the last few months, but it has been sweet.
They are concerned about Izzy as well: increasingly erratic, she has sold her house and is sleeping on friends’ couches, and has stopped taking her medication.
Meanwhile in Vermont, Antonia’s neighbour Roger has two Mexican undocumented immigrants working for him and living in a trailer, and their fear of immigration authorities is palpable. Spanish-speaking Antonio, who mostly wants to be left alone in her grief, is often called upon to translate and mediate. Despite her desire for solitude and peace, she finds herself helping a pregnant girl without papers, and getting pulled into their lives.
Izzy disappears while on a road trip to join the sisters in the Midwest, and there’s a new thread to the novel: finding the unpredictable, possibly bipolar Izzy. Sam’s passing is a constant undercurrent in Antonia’s life, and Alvarez touches on it again and again as Antonia goes about her daily life, outwardly normal.
Yet, for all these intense themes — mental illness, age, grief, undocumented immigrants, money, loneliness — the novel is never heavy or overly fraught. Alvarez has a way of always lightening the moment with a wry comment.
[The girl] is actually quite pretty, her brown skin so smooth and unblemished it looks polished. Antonio catches herself doing one of those Third-to-First-World makeovers she deplores in others: put on a little makeup, give her a nice haircut, dress her up in some trendy clothes, and Estela could be a model in one of those diversity-touting brands.
And the novel is surprisingly… funny, in addition to touching and thoughtful. The sisters’ relationship is always charming:
You need something done, funeral meats and cheeses set out on the table after a memorial service — that’s where Tilly shines. In emotional anguish — you aren’t sure what you want, whether to leave or not leave your philandering husband, throw in the towel on a friendship, call Izzy. For answers of the miscellaneous kind — the perfect breed of dog, the real estate market, the best shampoo for thinning hair, Mona’s your gal.
Nor do the plot twists ever seem artificial or contrived. One character is potentially dangerous to the undocumented, but there is a nice anti-stereotyping twist that comes towards the end of the novel.
Alvarez has a lovely natural way of intermingling Spanish and English in the dialogue.
The girl offers the slightest nod, her voice muffled, so it’s difficult to make out what she is saying. Something about having no one, no place to go. Es que estoy sola.
She underlines the variance of country and class among Latino cultures, even to language.
Antonio Googles the Spanish for giving birth, dar a luz. Is it not used in Mexico? According to one of the websites, parir is the working-class term. Dar a luz was used originally to refer to the Virgin Mary giving birth to the light of the world, a euphemism the upper classes appropriated.
But even the beauties of language, of words rightly chosen, are riddled with who we are, class and race […]
And just for a occasional, never overdone, bit of entertainment, Tilly’s malapropisms are delightful.
A wolf in cheap clothing
A pigment of my imagination
more churches per square root than anywhere
Although the novel is not about the sisters of How the Garcia Girls…, there are enough similarities that readers might well feel that this is about the Garcia sisters, all grown up, with new concerns, but still deeply bonded. It is such a pleasure to catch up with their lives.
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