Not a Matter of Love

by Beth Alvarado

"Beth Alvarado's splendid first book burns with the landscape of the Southwest and the quiet passions of its characters. Potent and darkly beautiful, these are unforgettable stories that haunt us long... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0898232333
• ISBN13: 9780898232332
• Release Date: October 2006
• Publisher: New Rivers Press
• Length: 183 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 6.2" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Conflicts of the Human Heart

Note: This review first appeared in The Arizona Daily Sun In his powerful Nobel Prize acceptance speech of 1950, William Faulkner delivered this tragic assessment of the state of literature: "The young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing, because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat." Beth Alvarado has not forgotten. In her first collection of short stories, Not a Matter of Love, Arizona writer Alvarado creates characters whose suffering and triumph is as real and as tangible as the paper on which the book is printed. In the title story, "Not a Matter of Love," we meet Jackie, a woman whose stepfather Paul cares only for his missing rum, and whose mother, Louise, consistently tells her daughter that she cannot be loved by the kind of man Jackie thinks might: a Mexican named Armando. Instead, Louise advocates for her daughter to date Frank, a golf pro. Jackie's sense of isolation in the context of her parents increases and she is forced to recollect the joy of being with Armando by herself. Her mother's judgmentalism and her stepfather's indifference demonstrate a weak love to Jackie, and Armando comes to represent the type of freedom she wants love to embody. Here, Alvarado reveals one of her greatest strengths as a writer: her ability to be both inside and outside a character's psyche, sharing the innermost suffering and triumph of that character while remaining loyal, even omniscient, to the story as a whole. Dealing with Jackie's inner turmoil and confusion about who to love and what love is, Alvarado writes, "Once, when they were making love, [Armando] stopped and pulled a book out from under the bed. Oh, he'd said, that's how you do it! She'd laughed. She'd never known it was okay to laugh while you were making love. He was nothing like Walker." Armando, as opposed to Walker, is carefree about love: it is a fun thing, something about which he can joke and laugh and enjoy. Walker, we learn at the start of the story, is Jackie's on-again-off-again boyfriend who becomes more a stalker than any sort of love interest. He corners her in Jackie's kitchen while her mother is outside and we are again both inside and outside Jackie's head: "Move it, Walker, your hand. He grins, no, make me, laughing." After Louise sees Walker cornering her daughter and does nothing, Jackie thinks to herself, "This must be love." Through these background situations, Alvarado leads us to Jackie's triumphant, though still sad, departure from home to be with Armando. Her relationship with her mother is still in disrepair, but Jackie has made the realization that her mother has not: it is not a matter of love--at least, not a matter of that kind of love, forced upon her by Walker or suggested via the golf pro. Jackie thinks to herself at one point, "It wasn't a matter of love, she wanted to tell her moth