The Things They Carried
Two women -- two centuries apart -- discover the limits of their good intentions.
SAVING THE WORLD
A Novel
  Novelist Julia Alvarez (© Bill Eichner) |
By Julia Alvarez
Algonquin. 368 pp. $24.95
Julia Alvarez isn't afraid to ask hard questions. Saving the World , as the title suggests, confronts one that's troubled every great religion: how to deal with social inequity. How can a person of sensitivity and conscience justify being one of "the lucky ones," as Alvarez puts it, when so many people elsewhere in the world haven't got the means to live, let alone "to be a human being"? Who can be saved, and how?
Alma Rodriguez Huebner, the heroine of this novel, is a writer without a story. Drowning in midlife depression, she's years behind on a book she's unable to write, and she's struggling to meet the demands of increasingly dependent but distant parents. The bonds of friendship and marriage seem more tenuous to her by the day. Readers' own politics will probably determine whether Alma sounds like a troubled person of principle or a whiny bore; she seems to feel that guilt is a sine qua non of American citizenship, but she's articulate about it. She realizes how much of her persona has been formed by meeting or rejecting others' expectations. But self-knowledge is not enough to make life meaningful for her.
She longs for the comfort and certainty of religious faith enjoyed by her elderly friend Helen, but as an agnostic that door is closed to her. Her only salvation may lie in her identity as a writer. And so she lets her husband go alone on an altruistic mission to the Dominican Republic, the homeland that she left 40 years before, and she stays behind in an effort to rediscover herself.
While he's gone, Alma finds her story -- and her salvation -- in a little-known but staggering historical event: the Royal Expedition of the Vaccine. In 1803 Don Francisco Balmis, with the blessing of the King of Spain, undertook to save the world from the scourge of smallpox. To this end, he sought out Doña Isabel, the rectoress of an orphanage, herself disfigured by the disease. A few years before, an English doctor named Jenner had discovered that milkmaids who contracted a harmless disease called cowpox became immune to the deadly and disfiguring smallpox. Don Francisco needed 22 young boys to serve as live carriers of the cowpox virus to bring salvation from the pox to the Spanish colonies across the sea. Doña Isabel, at once terrified and intrigued -- and living a life as limited as Alma finds hers -- agreed to allow the boys to go, but only if she went, too.
Alvarez -- a Dominican American herself, and married to a physician -- handles this double-stranded narrative deftly. The historical part of the story is excellent, a mini-novel unto itself. Beyond its own virtues, though, it serves both to balance the pacing of the modern story and to echo its theme.
The early part of the modern story occasionally seems slow, but by alternating it with the historical strand, Alvarez keeps the book engrossing. And midway through, Alma's life takes a turn as life-changing as Doña Isabel's decision to board the ship with her 22 foster sons.
Alma's husband works for a humanitarian enterprise called Help International, which may be hand-in-glove with Big Pharma, testing an AIDS vaccine in the Third World. Altruism tempered by self-interest may still be altruism, but what the local village mayor terms "dangerous elements" (local young men dissatisfied with their limited prospects) don't see it that way. Alma gets a call; the "green center" that her husband established has been taken over by local zealots, and her husband is a hostage. Alma flies at once to the Dominican Republic and into the center of a maelstrom of conflicting motives, actions and reactions that will change her life forever.
This story could easily have been a black-and-white polemic, but isn't. It's subtle, nuanced and deeply compassionate; it acknowledges the basic messiness of life, yet its bleakness is redeemed by the humanity of the characters, virtually all of whom are deeply troubled in one way or another. If Alvarez doesn't ask easy questions, she doesn't settle for easy answers, either. She steadfastly avoids religion in the modern story, while acknowledging it, of necessity, in the historical narrative (and acknowledging, too, that religion is no more pure than commerce).
"Saving The World" depicts the need to belong to something greater and more enduring than ourselves, whether that something be a social commitment, a world-saving expedition or a book. Whether we respond to the troubling question of inequality from a religious perspective (it's not an accident that " Alma " is the Spanish word for "soul") or a secular one -- Alvarez's search for that answer is a remarkable examination of conscience. ·
Diana Gabaldon is the author of a series of historical novels, including "Outlander" and "A Breath of Snow and Ashes."
