How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents

Dear Reader,

Although I have a great deal to share from the unfolding narrative of "Pedalpalooza" including a very literary bike ride this evening titled "Pun-ishment", here I will offer a review and list of questions raised by Julia Alvarez's How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. First, I would say that this first novel of Alvarez's offers a great deal more introspection and depth of character development than her second novel In The Time of the Butterflies - and after Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao was unleashed on the world, Butterflies seemed even more watery to me. Not that it is an overall weak novel, but I don't think it can hold a candle to Oscar Wao or the novel it replaces in IB curriculum for students who "can't" be exposed to Allende's opus on South American revolution, House of the Spirits. That digression said, I found a truth and honesty in the narrative project of HGGLTA that reminds me of Diaz and Alvarez at her best in Butterflies.
Because of the title, I was expecting a focus on the development of immigrant identity experienced by the Garcia girls; however, Alvarez's narrative works backwards, tracing the outlines of how this experience has created individuals and a family community. Kind of like Citizen Kane, Slumdog Millionaire, or a South American counterpart, Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold. In other words, the reader is invited - not unlike the viewer of In Treatment (the mesmerizing new HBO series about therapy with the dashing therapist played by Gabriel Byrne) - to meet adult individuals from the same family and infer how their shared immigrant (race, class gender)d experiences have shaped them and given them their current "issues". These "isseus" verge on cliche for a novel about upper-class women: as a writer unhappy in marriage, an anorexic painter and psychiatric patient, a precocious and fecund wife to a German engineer, and a psychologist married to her ex-therapist. However, these are certainly fun profiles of adult women to work with as a writer and as a reader, coupled with over-educated mom who never got to pursue her passion for invention and doctor dad. In fact, that pleasure and fascination I enjoyed while watching the recent film Rachel Getting Married stayed with me throughout reading these narratives about these women (they are all shared in third person: only once does "Yoyo" or Yolanda the writer take on the first person in her narrative). I found it interesting that Alvarez's style consistently uses the third person to describe the individual narratives of trauma that shaped these women - it's almost as if that third person were the analyst/writer-self of the adult women. Over the course of the novel, Alvarez shares threaded narratives of these sisters from the present to the era of immigration to New York, back to childhood in the Dominican Republic. While I didn't find the novel to be a remarkable example of exploring the immigrant identity process, which the title prompted me to predict, I was charmed and intrigued by the exploration of relationships through the vantage point of a non-neutral perspective ("third person as therapist/writer"). Perhaps, my fascination comes from my lack of knowledge about sibling relationships, coupled with my experiences with extremely important relationships I have shared amongst women as an adult.
Alvarez's use of simile is likewise charming and true to her voice in Butterflies, however, while this style helps glide the reader along her ride, the unexpected or jarring moments in the narrative never pop off of the page. I noticed a motif of mouths and interesting ways to describe mouths and it hit me after my new crush ordered a Lingua taco on the Taco Bike Ride last night, and explained that lingua is pork tongue, that mouths and Alvarez's choice to describe them in scenes with great emotion, invite the reader to acknowledge the symbolic power of the tongue, accents, and language that these sisters ATTACH to these pivotal scenes, which are not OBVIOUSLY about their immigrant identity . Neat. OK, so maybe the cracks of the novel (the corner of this novel's smile?) do explore the theme of a gendered immigrant experience after all...
Here are some of these moments:
"Her lips tightened. She set her teeth, top on bottom row, a calcium fortress."(75)
"He had told them he was seeing a 'Spanish Girl' and he reported they said that should be interesting for him to find out about people from other cultures. It bothered me that they should treat me like a geography lesson for their son. But I didn't have the vocabulary back then to explain even to myself what annoyed me about their remark."(98) - Lacan would love that one :)
"There were spaces between all her teeth; nothing dared block that woman's way even when she was smiling... I ached for the lesson to begin so I could draw and color in those ivory teeth with the purple muscle of the tongue showing like some fat beast caged inside her mouth." (pg. 244-245). Lingua indeed!
Clearly, Alvarez pays careful attention to symbols of orality in her characters - smiling, eating, kissing, not eating, and constantly reading emotion through mouths. Further, this motif binds the sisters' narratives into a fragmented whole, comprised of the selective memories of silence, outbursts, and restricted voice projected on to the fetishized power of the mouth. This reminds me of Sigrid Nunez's bilcultural/immigrant narrative Feather on the Breath of God which binds the festishized power of ballet dancing to cultural difference and anorexia.

OK... off to Pride and Prejudice and... Zombies!