How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (Julia Alvarez)

Genre: Literary fiction
Year Published: 1991

There's a musical called The Last 5 Years that I love with all my heart and soul. It is less like a traditional musical and more like a song cycle, as nearly every song is a solo sung by one of two characters, and there is little dialogue. The premise of TL5Y is that the two characters, Jamie and Kathy, sing alternating songs about their relationship -- but while Jamie starts at the beginning and moves towards their eventual divorce, Kathy begins at the moment after Jamie has left her for the last time and moves backwards in time to the night of their first date. They meet in the middle for his proposal and their wedding.

It's an extremely effective device, particularly for Kathy's character, who seems so unreasonable and distraught at the beginning, and eventually becomes a hopeful, cheerful (if flawed) young woman. I've known relatively stoic people to be moved to tears by the last song in the show, in which Kathy is joyfully reeling from her first date with Jamie, while Jamie tells Kathy why he needs to divorce her.

What does this have to do with Julia Alvarez's first novel? Well, as you may have guessed, Alvarez employs a similar device in telling the story of the four García sisters: she begins in 1989 with the return of the third sister from the U.S.A. to her birth country of the Dominican Republic, and traces the sisters' lives back to 1956, when they all lived there, before they were forced to flee. This allows us to look at the girls' childhoods through the lens of foreknowledge, and lends a poignancy to the hopes and ideals of the girls, who, as they grow older, face the double hardships of being both female and immigrants during a turbulent period of American history.

Alvarez is an exquisite writer: her prose is immediate, compelling, and poetic. She writes in a blend of the past and present tenses, of first and third persons, so that she erases the distinctions of time and perspective. Her characters are eminently believable, as are the relationships between them. She is a superb novelist.

My chief complaint with the book is that the timeline seems heavily skewed toward the few years spent in the Dominican Republic, with little room left over for the decades the girls lived in the States. Two of the girls, we are told, suffer psychiatric breakdowns that require hospitalization, but we know next to nothing about the causes or outcomes of those stays. The eldest survives a bad marriage that we are told nothing about. While the stories set "on the Island" are vivid and telling, the storytelling seems almost to break down when they immigrate, and though the "girls" are in their thirties at the book's beginning, their paths through life seem nearly untraceable after college.

Recommended? Yes, but be prepared to want more. (Alvarez has published a companion volume that I may have to search for at the library.)