Multifaceted; Poetic; Backwards
We think it's pretty neat when a novel's structure mirrors its subject matter. And How the García Girls Lost Their Accents manages to do that... three times over. At least. Check this out:
Lots of (loud) voices and lots of interruptions—Just like a night with your entire family.
First of all, the writing in this novel is multifaceted—it comes at us from six main perspectives, with a couple of minor perspectives thrown in for good measure. Just to make this really, really clear, each chapter is labeled with the names of the family members who will be the stars of that particular story. What's the effect of having all of these voices in the narrative? Well, it's loud. It's jumbled. It gets interrupted. Here's an example of what we're talking about:
"Four—no, three of you, back then—three girls, and no money coming in."
"Well," the father interrupted. "I was working."
"Your father was working." The mother frowned. Once she got started on a story, she did not acknowledge interruptions. "But that measly little paycheck barely covered the rent."
The father frowned. "And my father," the mother continued, "was helping us out—"
"It was only a loan," the father explained to his son-in-law. "Paid every penny back."
"It was only a loan," the mother continued. "Anyway—the point is to make the story short [...]" (1.3.11-15)
Too late for that, Mami.
The point of all these interruptions is to make the narrative just as loud and dynamic and full of tangents as a dinner with the García family. No matter how short and sweet everyone wants the story to be, it won't be. It can't be. There are too many opinionated people chiming in.
Poetic language is like a secret code, so get out your decoder rings, kids!
Yoyo is a poet, so it makes sense that there are a few parts to this novel that have a more poetic style. In other words, the meaning of the sentences isn't transparent. Like poetry, the words in these passages are more than what they seem. They have symbolic meaning.
Here's a good example of poetic language in the chapter called "Joe":
Her father moved to the window and checked the sky. "When are you coming home?" the back asked Yo.
"Whenever she's ready to!" Her mother parted the hair from Yo's forehead. And the valentine appeared again on the earth. (1.4.131-133)
Don't take the language in this passage literally, because it won't make much sense. Read it with the eyes of a poet, looking for hidden meaning:
When "the back" asks Yo a question, we know it's not really a "back" talking, but Yo's father. This is an example of a synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part of something stands for the whole thing: in this case, Papi's back for Papi. But we can't stop there. We have to ask ourselves why it's Papi's back that's talking to Yoyo. Why not his face? It is because he can't face the fact that his daughter is mentally ill?
And what about the weird statement: "the valentine appeared again on the earth"? On one level we're talking about Yoyo's heart shaped face, which is revealed when Mami smoothes her hair back. But on another we know that it means Yoyo is starting to feel like she can love again. Because hearts are a symbol for love. (You probably already knew that.)
"Joe" is the most poetic and cryptic of all the chapters in the novel. It contains a really important symbol—the black raven—that we discuss in depth in the section on "Symbols."
Sdrawkcab. Uh, we mean backwards.
Okay, this is possibly the coolest stylistic element you will hear about all week. The entire story is told... backwards.
That's right. The novel starts with Yolanda's adulthood and moves back in time, through Fifi's elopement and the family riff it causes, Sandi's mental breakdown, Yolanda's divorce and mental breakdown, and Yolanda's first sexual relationship. And that's just in the first section.
Aside from the fact that it is just plain impressive to be able to keep things suspenseful when your readers already know how things are going to turn out, telling the story backwards raises a lot of questions. Like, uh, why does Alvarez do it?
Well, here's our take on it. This novel is more than just the story of a Dominican family's escape from political persecution and their transition to life in the United States. That's the novel as read from the end to the beginning, the one that's told backwards in time.
The real, meaty, deep-down story of this novel is how Yolanda learns to accept herself. At the beginning of the novel, Yolanda is an adult woman who feels like a wreck; she's trapped between cultures, she doesn't know what language to speak, she doesn't know where her home is. In looking back over her life, Yolanda figures out who she is.
Hm...that sounds to us a lot like a certain kind of therapy developed by Sigmund Freud called "psychoanalysis". Also known as "the talking cure," psychoanalysis focuses on talking through your memories in order to uncover past traumas that might be making you feel all crazy and insecure without your even knowing it!
So even though Yolanda makes fun of her sister Carla's psychological approach to everything, she's actually engaging in a kind of psychological therapy just by telling these stories. Of course, a "talking cure" comes much more naturally to Yoyo than any of Carla's jargon-y explanations.