We Did Good Enough

Vesper North ponders Lisa Alvarez’s new story collection.

By Vesper NorthJanuary 3, 2026

• Fiction

AT A GLANCE, the subject of Lisa Alvarez’s debut short story collection, Some Final Beauty and Other Stories (2025), is not unique. The book’s 11 stories examine the effects of familiar suffering: losing a loved one, struggling with addiction, falling out with an old friend. Yet Alvarez draws out vital complexities along the spectrum of trauma responses, especially as they unfold within and across generations.

Alvarez’s stories range in setting from the Reagan-era of trickle-down economics to the current Trump regime, focusing on protagonists who are sometimes lonesome, ill, or lost. Yet for all their scope, these narratives evince a clear structural pattern: no character gets through unscathed. In “We Told You So,” Angelo Vitalis, a former high school physics teacher in Southern California, mourns the loss of his wife Margot. Upon his impending retirement, the couple was to travel the world on their bicycles—until Margot was struck by a van (while, incidentally, riding her bike) and died. Angelo’s attempt at “justice,” at least in the legal sense, is dashed: at trial, the jury deadlocks. While the prosecutor won’t refile, she assures Angelo that the elderly van driver will surrender his keys, the kind of incomplete victory common throughout Alvarez’s collection.

Angelo paraphrases Newton’s first law of motion as: “Every body continues in its state of rest, or uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” This is, of course, not precisely Newton’s first law, but Angelo’s reframing provides a compelling psychological interpretation of the human condition: people move through life until tragedy strikes, at which point they either enter stasis or change their path. Angelo does the latter: when he doesn’t receive justice the first time around, he alters course and sues the state, chasing a salve for his grief.

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Some Final Beauty weaves a tapestry of pain that is not easily mended. In the titular story, Toni attends the funeral of her great-niece Sophie, who has died from a fentanyl overdose. Toni’s story is not simply one of the loss of her friend; it is one in which she appears as a victim of her own superficiality. After all, Toni doesn’t know how Sophie came by the fentanyl, but she readily convinces herself that it must have been via Sophie’s boyfriend Cody: a “white guy, old enough to be her father, as they say. The son of old Del Mar money slumming in the city. She knew the type. She’d seen them her whole life.” Though she’s never met Cody, spotting him at the funeral only reinforces her conviction: he is leaning up against a fence “all duded up in [Western] wear: boots, hat, suede jacket with fringe.” Toni describes him as someone who was once handsome but who has let himself go: “Unfortunate mustache. Nice enough clothes that were a little too tight for his pudge. He drank something out of a can wrapped in an insulated holder. Even from here she could tell it was beer.”

Throughout the collection, Alvarez’s use of nonlinear storytelling reflects our innate practice of revision. Toni in particular remembers Sophie in an idealistic form bordering on fantasy: the nurse washing Sophie’s hair “combed it, arranged it as she thought the girl would want, finally weaving it into a thick braid. Some final beauty.” Indeed, Toni’s judgment on Cody derives from her Sleeping Beauty–esque romanticization of her niece’s death: “The young woman was comatose, her small body wrapped in pale blue hospital garb, the ventilator clamped to the lower part of her face, her fairy-tale princess hair spread around her.” It’s a stark but effective demonstration of how tragedy afflicts perception and, from there, behavior: Toni’s rash decision-making is born from her palpable desperation to eradicate the anguish she feels in the wake of Sophie’s death. It’s also a reminder that, human though these impulses may be, they are often acted upon in vain. Toni confronts Cody at the service. She is determined to make him feel guilty, regardless of whether he actually is. For her, he fits a certain bill, and that’s that. Yet she finds no peace—in the way that Angelo’s ultimate legal success does not heal his grief. “We did good,” Angelo’s friend says to him, to which Angelo replies, “Good enough.” That’s the most anyone can hope for in Alvarez’s collection: not happily ever after, but contentment.

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Perhaps the collection’s stylistic shifts were intended to evoke the nuances of trauma response. Often, Alvarez’s prose is granular; there is an empathetic exactitude in her description of, say, Sophie in her hospital bed, or a couple, in “The Frontera Grill,” enjoying “two tortillas, gently folded in thirds, warm in their hands like clean cotton fresh from a clothes dryer […], the tender pull of the dough when […] bit, the sharp sprinkles of salt against the butter.” Alvarez uses this depth of detail to create a connection between character and reader, so we can see the story through their eyes.

Yet in the opening story, “Everyone Was Singing ‘Freiheit,’” this sensory detail is missing. At its center is Laurie, a young woman who works the AA program at her local church. She attends meetings, assists with setting up and breaking down events, and finds community with elderly rebels, one of whom fought in the Spanish Civil War. Here, the nonlinear storytelling renders the narrative disjointed and is occasionally devoid of a firm sense of place and time. This lack of clarity undercuts the collection’s emotional resonance.

The stories alternate between first-person and close third-person narrative, exposing the characters’ vulnerabilities. This is another area where “Everyone Was Singing ‘Freiheit’” falls short: the narrator keeps the reader at bay, recounting what Laurie does or where she’s been but rarely revealing the depth of her feelings—rendering her, effectively, a hollow shell in her own story. Even when she rescues her new friend, Herman, during an earthquake, Laurie is quiet. Herman claims that he could have died if not for Laurie. “He elevated the tale he told of his rescue to epic status, casting Laurie as a fearless heroine,” Alvarez writes.

She found him pinned under the hymnal bookcase, ready with a joke about the fate of an atheist Jew stuck in a collapsing church. It wasn’t a good joke, but he made the effort. No, it was those cigarettes that killed Herman, not long after the temblor, just as his wife Millie had always warned.

The scene ends there, jumping forward to his funeral service with, again, hardly a glimmer of emotion from Laurie.

The sparse detail and shallow interiority in Laurie’s narrative are largely an anomaly among the other stories—especially “Manuel.” The eponymous protagonist is a World War II soldier who sees Gene Kelly at boot camp in Virginia. “While the sailors made a circle around him and clapped, Lieutenant Kelly leapt into that famous Russian squat dance, the prisyádka.” Alvarez meticulously details the dance:

His alternating legs kicking out straight, his arms like wings, folding and unfolding, his sensitive narrow face, chin up, sweaty with joy. All that effort and exertion were somehow invisible beneath the exuberant dance. Manny had never seen anything like it, a bit of movie magic off the screen and here in front of him in a chilly airplane [hangar], a man dancing to music that only he could hear.

Alvarez takes time to render—in this case, to savor—such scenes, and it’s these moments of immediacy and intimate observation that give the book its heft.

Similarly sensory detail elicits empathy in “A Pretty Penny,” where the central figure, June, first graces the pages as a braless feminist in 1980s Los Angeles. June ponders the implications of the life of her mother—a Korean immigrant swept away to the United States to wed an American soldier. June’s mother says little about her feelings on the matter, but June knows this much:

The streetlights pop on, like a chain of cheap bright pearls. That’s my mother, making her way down the street. Once Jyeong-soon, then Joanne, finally Mrs. Robert Harper. That’s how she signs her name still. Tears in her eyes, she told me that that name is still the most beautiful to her.

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Weaving emotion with scenery allows Alvarez to portray the subtlety of connection, occasionally love, and expose the intimacy of public spaces. In “Visitors Together,” the divorcée Yolanda makes continual visits to her sister at the psychiatric ward while dealing with a strained relationship with her young daughter at home. Though she spends much of her personal time with either her sister or her daughter, Yolanda appears to be very much alone—until she makes an unlikely connection with a taxi driver, an immigrant widower from Afghanistan: “One night Zemari picked her up at the depot in his big yellow taxi. […] By the time they reached the hospital Zemari knew more about Yolanda than many of her co-workers did.”

Yolanda and Zemari become consistent figures in each other’s lives after he offers to ferry her to and from the hospital personally. As with Toni in “Some Final Beauty,” Yolanda’s story ends without resolution, but it does have hope. She ponders introducing her daughter, Alex, to Zemari—taking the scenic route to the hospital, where they would spend time with Yolanda’s sister. She thinks, “Alex could see for herself what good could be done for people, by people, to people and what, finally, perhaps could not. Anybody might see.” Does Yolanda follow through on her fantasy? Alvarez leaves that for the reader to decide—though it’s worth asking whether that matters in the first place.

Some Final Beauty displays the most frustrating and admirable parts of humanity coexisting. These stories are not clean-cut tales with beginnings, middles, and ends; they are messy vignettes that start in the heart of the worst periods in their characters’ lives, never to be wholly resolved. The characters may be vain, insufferable, or heartbreaking (sometimes all at once), but their inability to find a reprieve from sadness is what gives them staying power. As in Angelo’s version of Newton’s first law, people move through life until tragedy strikes. Alvarez is not interested in the stasis but in the ways that we—inevitably—move forward again.