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But it’s also a love story, and love – deep, mundane, flawed – covers the book so warmly that the pages seem to shine with it. “You are not alone,” Vladimir reassures the unanchored Luz, echoing the solidarity around José García. “We take care of each other.” Natera is a painstaking painter of what Robert Hayden calls the “plain and lonely offices of love”: Eusebia greases Luz’s hair and scalp at night, even when Vladimir refuses to hang up on his daughter first, even on busy workdays. The novel expresses love in the least of its terms: Spanglish, with whom mother and daughter communicate, Eusebia “She had learned enough to understand Luz, but her body refused to speak of it”; Lines by the famous poet, expressing the love he “could never say in his own words”, which Vladimir read to Eusebia when they were reunited in New York. Luz’s childhood best friend, Angélica, now the twins’ mother and waiting tables at the members-only restaurant in Midtown, where Luz’s colleagues are dining; Eusebia’s sister Cuca, who goes home to DR for a cosmetic remodel of her entire body to win back a stray husband; and Tongues, a gossip trio of Nothar Park’s “history sewn in”.
Natera’s style is refreshingly direct and declarative, and at its best, this approach is confident and poignant, a mirror that captures the bleak comedies of life in a threatened community. The Guerrero’s host sends a letter translated into Spanish, a rare courtesy: “They knew it meant trouble.” He offers all tenants a purchase – “or of course they can buy the flats,” our third-person narrator grins. When a tenant accepts the neighborhood and flees “faster than a Dominican lottery winner gets home,” Eusebia and Tongues track the goods of a truck car, painted company name BETTER MOVEMENT, both as an advertisement and a warning.
Elsewhere, this simplicity can weigh heavy. The characters think in sullen abstraction and boringly announce themes such as “pray, the power of communion, transforming pain and despair from the seemingly devastating despair of fate.” Defending both her environmentalism and her scrutiny for her book collection, Hudson told Luz “conservation… They don’t seem like the joking or bickering couple I’ve met. Their mutual and genuine attraction, despite their historical scent of patronage and control, suffers from a stale shorthand that cannot be a convincing wedge between Luz – “a once-in-a-lifetime thing,” a “rare kind of connection.” and Eusebia. The dilemma is embarrassed to be true when Hudson offers Luz an ending to this otherwise naturalistic novel that hits an incongruous, almost dystopian note.
But their subtle romance feels like a minor omission next to the book’s oddly ambiguous treatment of Eusebia, written in the eloquent, righteous language of Natera’s rallying cry: the lines you can imagine hearing from the stage at José García’s watch are lines of passion and conviction. but delivered remotely. “Helpless people are being crushed by structures less powerful than this every day,” Eusebia thinks, looking at the buildings in progress. Behind Eusebia’s increasingly violent mission, we are asked to believe that wide-ranging calls for “a sacrifice worth something” or for losing “all they love” are enough to mobilize an army of neighbors.
In a characteristically lyrical yet distant passage, Eusebia is “surrounded by the natural noises of a neighborhood that obscures the hostility outside of what she is doing here. Somewhere in the distance, a baby cried… as if it was emphasizing what was really at stake.” Again and again, the mother calls What they did, Whatin danger and “what they owe the walls of this apartment”. When Eusebia rejected her parents’ surprise of retirement—the bitter expectation of being “nobles in their own country”—Luz herself began to wonder, like me, “what won her mother over about this place.” Maybe this is incomprehensible What it talks about the intangible value of the house, the erasures that occur even while reading, the right of a community to exist without suing itself. Yet the fiction sings in details, not distant voices, and I missed a closer, more sharply amplified sense of how such violent devotion grew out of Eusebia’s alienation, radicalizing the once self-erasing “stranger” into the avenging angel of her community. .
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