"You See Their Feet": Grounding and Grace in Lisa Alvarez's Some Final Beauty

In her debut collection, Lisa Alvarez’s moral vision, her love for her characters, and her eye for beauty are never at odds with—and, in fact, light the way towards—complexity, precision, strangeness, humor, failure, and irresolution. Together, these qualities make the stories in Some Final Beauty generous, true, and deeply, refreshingly good both ethically and aesthetically. The collection feels like a gift to its readers and, especially, a gift to Southern California, a place Alvarez clearly loves and that she truly sees.

The titular final beauty is a braid in the hair of a comatose girl, about to die of an overdose. Even though “there was no coming back from where Sophie was,” a nurse has “washed the hair, combed it, arranged it as she thought the girl would want, finally weaving it into a thick braid. Some final beauty.”  Each story in the collection feels to me like a bestowal of this kind: full of patient attention, tenderness, and care, despite or because of the big, careless, and ultimately unstoppable forces they’re up against. Another story, “We Told You So,” opens in the point of view of Pam, whose heart is (often hilariously) closed to the beauty of the Orange County canyon where she lives, its “autumn sunshine,” “cartoony elders,” and “tiny animals with strange names.”  But the story’s heart is not closed to Pam: it sees, as her fellow canyon residents Angelo and Margot do, her pain and her potential. It gives her the chance to rise to the occasion, and shows her seizing this chance in a way that’s utterly credible because the writing contains not a trace of grandiosity or sentimentality or revision to the Pam-ness of Pam. Rather, it stays close to the particulars of bike lane policy failures, of Pam’s pedicure, of the landscaping at a Santa Ana civic center, of Angelo’s grief and insight, of Pam’s expertise and longing.

Tender attention abounds in this collection, and these stories know exactly what such attention is good for and what it isn’t. In “Visitors Together,” Yolanda, who comes often to see her sister Ali in the psych ward, now called the Behavioral Unit (Alvarez excels in recording weird, careful-yet-careless institutional language) helps the man in front of her in the visitor line strip the underwire out of a set of bras that he wants to give his wife.  The bras are “the color of gems found in a child’s fairy-tale book: emerald green, ruby red, turquoise blue, a deep amethyst purple,” but Yolanda knows upon seeing them that the Behavioral Unit will consider the underwire a hazard. She wants to help, and knows how—you “snip a hole near the top and then withdraw the flat metal crescents.”  She succeeds in helping the man, and he’s able to give the bras to his wife along with a Bible, which amuses Yolanda; she succeeds, too, in amusing Zemari, the cab driver who regularly takes her from the train station to the hospital, with the story.  But Ali is still in the psych ward. Also, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is still growing, with—as the science fair judges tell Yolanda’s daughter Alex—no practical solution, since the powers that be, science fair judges included, find ceasing plastic production impractical. The precision of the story’s gaze, the simultaneous bemusement and pathos with which it takes in little things (the yogurt cups and razor blades of Alex’s facsimile garbage patch, the barred windows and ocean smells of the Behavioral Unit, Zemari’s endearments, the fairy-tale bras) feels to this reader like the only possible balm.

The stories play with fairy-tale images—those gem-tone bras, flowers around a long-haired girl’s casket, a walnut tree that rises Jack and the Beanstalk-style above L.A.—which make beautiful companions to the stories’ fullness, worldliness, and groundedness. Fullness: Alvarez has imagined a complete life and rich inner world for every character here. In “The Mayor and the Folksinger,” a mythic story that culminates in a showdown between corruption and principle, between a mayor in disguise and a folksinger high in a walnut tree, we get, also, the mayor’s boyhood as “that rare bird, the Mexican hippie,” as well as his fantasy of a “Grand Biographer” writing his every move, as well as his night drives, a conversation with his intern, the big open bins and pewter scoops and scales of the produce section of the grocery store when he was a kid.  Worldliness: these stories know how things work, and they revel in the details and textures of life. The Mayor’s car rolls past “gum-pocked” sidewalks, “stained with spit and littered with trash, glitter; the tiny sparks of quartz and broken bottles catch the streetlights, the headlights of cars.”  Elsewhere, the Bicycle Safety Task Force reports to the County Board of Supervisors, recommending yield signs in six locations, but improvements are never made because Caltrans decides the county is responsible and the county decides that Caltrans is responsible. Elsewhere, an ex-boyfriend has daughters named Madison and Hayden and a wife who is quoted in an article called “Beyond the Bounce House,” about keeping up with upscale children’s birthday parties. Groundedness: often, our point-of-view characters are sturdy women in middle age who have long histories in L.A., and who see more than they say. I love the moment in “Frontera Grill” when Maggie, who has followed her son under a table at a fancy restaurant, is reminded of sit-ins—how, “At first you feel vulnerable, silly, embarrassed, sitting down while the rest of the world remains standing.  You see their feet, boots, and shoes. You see the dirt others cannot. You are small again. Then, Maggie remembered, you become rooted, somehow stronger together.”  These stories too, see the dirt others cannot. They are humble and grand, strong but acquainted with weakness, they have their feet on the ground, and swinging from a tree, and pedaling a bike; from these several vantages, they see beauty, magic, kindness, violence, sense, and senselessness.

And they don’t feel the need to tie everything up. Rather, they know about the pleasure and wisdom that come from taking in weirdness and incongruity. The slenderest story in the collection, “Cielito Lindo,” blooms over its three pages as Linda, listening to a mariachi band at a family gathering, notices that her still-handsome, womanizing, grandchildren-ogling father is wearing a girl’s undershirt in place of his usual wifebeater.  The shirt, with its embroidered bouquet, delights Linda, and allows her an expansive view of her father, as she and the little story move from closed to open and from certainty to awe. Other times, we see the incongruity from the other angle. “Manuel,” the story of the night that a young, Mexican American World War II veteran goes to hear Paul Robeson speak, lands in the present, on Manny’s deathbed, surveying his personal effects. Just as, in “Cielito Lindo,” Linda has no way of explaining the undershirt, here the family will have no way of explaining the photo strip images of a young blonde girl, as incongruous in Manny’s wallet as Manny was at the Black church where he went to hear Paul Robeson.  But, in this case, the reader is the keeper of this lost information, and the story’s final note is poignant and shot through with empathy.

Reading this collection, I realized how rare it is to find literature of Southern California where this place is not a product or a fantasy, not as in Manny’s war buddy’s North Carolinian sister’s imagination, “oranges and palm trees, movie stars.”  Here, instead, we get the “generous side-street haul-away economy” of Santa Monica in the 80s. We get an Orange County canyon like a “big swoop of wild.”  We get fire season: “Wind-whipped trash was trapped, flapping against the fence. The dry brush on the hills looked ready to combust. The air was orange, thick.”  We get the exhilaration of driving at night:

The ride down Central went fast. It was slightly downhill, not that Manny had noticed the gentle incline earlier. But now, with the streetlights glowing, a misty fog rolling in from the distant Pacific, and few cars, he seemed to glide. The rubber tires whispered on the damp pavement. As he glided, gaining speed, he felt as if he could predict which lights would stay green. It began to feel as if the lights would be green all the way down, one green light after another after another. Robeson’s voice was still reverberating in him.

I find myself wanting to live in Alvarez’s Southern California, or to learn to live in it like her stories live in it: knowing, remembering, seeing, and rooted and steadfast and good-humored against the machine of our greedy, quick-moving, careless, ahistorical moment. Writing has the reputation of being what you do when you can’t quite live in the world: a respite for the alienated into their inner world. These stories are thrilling and inspiring because they feel like the opposite: the product of a life lived in community, and lived with courage, grace, and love.

Rebecca Schultz's work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Santa Monica Review, BOMB, and Full Stop Quarterly, and will be performed at the Skirball Cultural Center in L.A. in March 2026.  She teaches fiction and poetry at UC Irvine.