Saving the World - Julia Alvarez

When is the last time you read a novel where at the end the great flaw in the love story wasn't laid bare to the reader? The dead spouse's lover doesn't come forward, the step-mother isn't hiding some awful secret in her past, no ghost of dead child lurking just a few pages ahead? I'm almost programmed to be guessing which of the myriad of possibilities it will be as soon as any character is established as truly in love with anyone. Julia Alvarez provides two such stories in one little novel. Go figure.

Saving the World is, on the surface, the story of Alma Huebner, happily-married one time author. She has a wonderful little life in Vermont that she came to lateish (39 gasp) with a husband who may be fussy but who loves her, good friends nearby, and an ailing surrogate mother across the yard. Her only problem is that her teeth have started to itch. She's struggling to finish a novel for which she's already taken the advance, she is too easily irritated with her loving husband and is becoming judgmental of her friends. Pretty standard every day stuff. That's the thing, Julia Alvarez, in the first half of this novel, does a stand up job of demonstrating how the everyday can be desperate, compelling, overwhelming, even when we know it isn't - when it's someone else's everyday.

The parallel story to Alma's is the book she's actually writing. It's not a book she had any intention to write, it just started. It's the imagining of the life a barely mentioned woman in the historical accounts of a Spanish expedition in the early 1800s. The kind of thing that's gotten popular lately. Alma, as her life gets to be too much for her, finds solace in her imagined Isabel (which might be one of the most romantic Spanish names in my humble). Isabel has a love story of her own. Again, it is far from perfect, never for a second idealized by the author (although often times by the character), and again there is no stunning twist. So we have these two women juxtaposed beautifully, most effectively in the moments where Alma seems the fictional imagining of someone who tells story for a living and Isabel flesh blood.

I don't generally love the two stories in one format. I generally find myself interest in only one of the two and skimming the other. Not this time. I was not equally interested, but my interest in both stories waxed and waned so that I stayed involved in both. That may be an incredible gift of pacing and it may be a result of my attention span, I'm not sure which. Neither story is happy, but they are woven together in a way that is totally satisfying and I'm prone to sad so your mileage may vary.