The Good Works of Ayela Linde

Charlotte Forbes

Novels are great, but there’s something about a short story—it’s artful, immediate, compact, and evocative. The Good Works of Ayela Linde , New York writer and O. Henry Prize-winner Charlotte Forbes gives us both—a novel in stories. In sixteen stories, we learn about the title character, Ayela Linde, from the townspeople in the fictitious border town of Santa Rosalia. Raised by her mother and her superstitious grandmother, Ayela Linde (nee Garzan) is physically striking, aloof, fearful, and her stories are all told by those who know her, or think they do—her housekeeper, the townspeople, a girlhood friend, her daughter-in-law, a travel agent, the pork butcher, as well as some by narrators.

The stories range from Ayela at age 17 to her last and most dubious “good work” at the moment of her death—and the final story, which concerns Ayela’s influence from beyond the grave. Forbes comes from the premise that, as is the case with most of us, the good works of Ayela Linde often went unnoticed, weren’t regarded as particularly good, occasionally backfired or were unintentional—but they hint at the truth that we all continually act and react in ways that touch others, and that these actions and reactions, particularly the slightest of them, speak to who we are.

In The Washington Times John Greenya said, “I was planning to get through this review without making reference to ‘magical realism,’ the literary mode the critic Ray Verzasconi defines as, ‘an expression of the New World reality which at once combines the rational elements of the European super-civilization, and the irrational elements of a primitive America.’ But Charlotte Forbes, an American, not a South American, writer fuses those two often warring elements most successfully.”

That is just one of the many successes in this absorbing debut novel. Each of us who reads this enchanting book will probably zero in on some aspect of Ayela’s life as portrayed by those who knew her and how it touches us personally in some special way. For as the stories unfold, Ayela inspires the independent spirit in each of us, only she lives and breathes what the rest of us merely think of after the fact. The story told by Rosalba Vilar captures the essence of the Ayela that resonates best for me.

As told by Rosalba, Ayela was sought after by the Alter Society to take the lead in the historic preservation of an old mission chapel that had fallen into ruin. Ayela of dubious heritage, who had risen above reproach in the town through the influence of her fortuitous marriage, still has the courage and purity of intent to say no to fundraising and a leadership task that doesn’t suit her. Instead, in secret, Ayela quietly and anonymously joins the peasant workers on their hands and knees silently scrubbing the filth from the the chapel, unknown to the old biddies who condemn her refusal to join forces with them in their circumscribed manner. This is the Ayela who inspires time after time as vignette tumbles upon ancedote to whisper to the reader that right or wrong is less relevant when compared to honesty of intent and spontaneity of deed.

Review by Linda Stallone

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