One ingredient most of us look for in a novel is plausibly lifelike fictional beings we’re willing to spend some time among. While many of the characters in Ann Dávila Cardinal‘s new book We Need No Wings fail to make strong or lasting impressions, her protagonist, Tere Sanchez, is enchanting — good company indeed.
Cardinal, who lives in Morrisville and earned her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts, is a self-avowed “aging tattooed Gringa-Rican punk.” Her previous books include the young-adult horror novel Five Midnights (2019), which won an AudioFile Earphones Award and an International Latino Book Award; and a sequel, Category Five (2020), an ILBA finalist. Her first adult novel, The Storyteller’s Death (2022), was a finalist for the Vermont Book Award and winner of the popular fiction category of the ILBA. Her young-adult “horror rom-com” Breakup From Hell was published in 2023.
As of last month, Cardinal has two new books: We Need No Wings and Hispanic Star: Bad Bunny. The latter, written for children with Claudia Romo Adelman, is a biography of the Puerto Rican rapper.
In We Need No Wings, Tere is a Puerto Rican professor of American literature who lives in Vermont. On leave from teaching after her husband, Carl, suffered a fatal stroke, she is mired in grief, with “hours spent sitting in a chair staring off into space … as if the silence of the empty house had weight, like a pile of cinder blocks that pressed down on her.”
Cardinal’s protagonist is intrepid enough to carry the weight of a story about how life resumes beyond a staggering loss.
Colleagues implore Tere to return to the classroom, and she’s refreshed by the students’ responses when she gives a guest lecture on magical realism. Yet Tere is unable to get back in motion. As a year passes, she risks losing her tenured position.
Then a plot device sets off tectonic shifts: Tere suddenly and inexplicably levitates while watering a bed of peonies that her husband had planted and lovingly tended.
The familiar electric heat of panic flooded her body in a wave, and suddenly she no longer felt weightless but rather unbalanced, out of control. She pinwheeled her arms and kicked her legs, but all this did was upend her in the air, until she was horizontal to the ground, frantically swimming with her limbs and getting nowhere. She held tight to the bright green hose, the only thing tethering her to the earth. Her stomach lurched, and she wondered if she was going to vomit; meanwhile, all she could do was impotently flail about like a fish on a dock.
Cardinal’s middle name, Dávila, means “from Avila” — the city in Spain from which some of her family hails and where most of this new novel is set. As she explains in an interview at the back of the book, Cardinal has found evidence that she’s descended from the family of Spanish mystic and author Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582), cofounder of the “discalced” (barefoot or sandal-wearing) Carmelite order of nuns and friars. In We Need No Wings, Tere also counts Teresa as an ancestor as well as namesake.
Tere is unnerved by nearly being caught levitating on campus. Having learned from a book that St. Teresa was known for “raptures” that at times involved levitation, Tere decides to travel to the nun’s birthplace. She hopes to find an explanation, and a remedy, for her inconvenient and potentially dangerous spells of weightlessness. If not halted by a ceiling, would she just keep floating up and away like a helium balloon?
The story that unspools in Spain is captivating, if never entirely surprising. Cardinal has fashioned a protagonist as vivacious as she is passionate to learn. The urgency of Tere’s quest to understand why she sometimes slips free of gravity is complemented by her gradual passage through mourning for her lost beloved.
None of the other characters is nearly as engaging as Tere. Her son, Rowan; fellow professor Richard; and new Spanish acquaintances Rodrigo, Yolanda and Juan are only sketchily developed and tightly harnessed to the requirements of a storyline.
Only Tere’s distant cousin Sister Isabella, a marvelously cranky cloistered nun who has long lived in Ávila, succeeds in rising off the page whenever she appears — and never predictably.
Like her characterization, Cardinal’s dialogue often sounds predetermined by the narrative scheme, advancing the story effectively but dutifully.
In Spain, of course, everyone interacts with Tere in Spanish, which the Nuyorican Vermonter also speaks. Is it unreasonable to suggest that Cardinal’s dialogue ought somehow to reflect these conversations taking place in another language? Instead, the characters in We Need No Wings always speak an especially slangy, present-day American English.
Despite these distractions, Cardinal’s novel is enjoyable and memorable. As a protagonist, Tere is intrepid enough to carry the weight of a story that’s essentially about how life resumes beyond a staggering loss. Whether her levitations are real or imaginary, as literary spectacle they are convincing and cathartic.
Each chapter begins with a quotation from Teresa of Ávila’s own writings. We can see why Cardinal, and her character Tere, have found instructive grace in passages such as this one from the nun’s 16th-century autobiography, which seems to describe a levitation:
Sometimes I have been able to overcome it, but the struggle has left me drained, like someone who has been in a fight with a giant. At other times it has been impossible to resist. Then it has carried away my entire soul — and sometimes my head too — and I have been powerless to hold myself back. Sometimes the experience has taken up my whole body and lifted it off the ground.
From We Need No Wings
Tere took one last deep breath, opened her eyes, and turned to put her key in the front lock to find it was a foot below where it should be. She looked up and saw the stone cornice that ran over the door right in front of her face and felt the rapturous release of gravity’s hold on her, her skin alive as if it were its own separate being. As she grabbed hold of the stone with her fingers, a sensation swelled in her belly, much like when a roller coaster dropped suddenly — safe but unimaginably thrilling. For a moment, she considered letting go, imagined letting her entire self go and becoming one with the eternity that blossomed at the edge of her known universe, but then a flame of fear built in her chest, that if she did, she would fly up into the cosmos and be lost forever.
Cardinal reads from the book in the New England Review Ulysses Reading Series on Thursday, October 10, 7 p.m., at the Humanities House at Middlebury College; and discusses it with three other authors on Thursday, October 24, 7 p.m., at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier. anndavilacardinal.com
The original print version of this article was headlined “Flight Risk | Book review: We Need No Wings, Ann Dávila Cardinal”
This article appears in Oct 9-15, 2024.
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