Julia Alvarez is a "serious" writer, one who deals with themes and issues connecting the individual, the family, the community, and the state; in her work, the health and condition of the individual seems always to be a reflection in some useful and meaningful way of the others. The place and function of the artist and the politician and the ways in which the creative and the political impulses come together in poetry and pedagogy play a large role in this, Alvarez's fourth novel, even more strongly than in her three earlier novels. The nature of a Dominican homeland, la patria, occupies center stage, with Alvarez clearly arguing that the enormous difficulties of creating a working state, a democracy, a true homeland, are intimately tied to the sexual habits of so many upper-class Dominican men. She connects political tyranny with the machismo that creates habits of...