The Nature of Things

Reading this book reminded me in some ways of Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking . Like Didion, Julia Alvarez's protagonist Antonia Vega lost her beloved husband less than a year ago and she's finding it very difficult to cope with life without him and just to get on with it. Antonia is a recently retired educator and a writer who lives alone now in rural Vermont. Her late husband, Sam, was a much-respected doctor who was an integral part of the community, caring for the locals as well as for immigrants, mostly undocumented, who came to work the local farms. Antonia herself is the daughter of immigrants from the Dominican Republic and that is an essential part of her self image. Since her husband's death, she finds herself more and more coming to embody his attitudes and his caring nature, while during his life, she played the "bad cop" to his "good cop." She muses at one point that Sam is taking over, that she is becoming Sam. Well, she coul...