When altruism goes awry

“SAVING the World” is a novel with seriously good intentions. Its execution, regrettably, is flawed.

Julia Alvarez, a novelist and children’s author who teaches writing at Middlebury College in Vermont, sets out to examine two acts of questionable altruism toward people of the Caribbean that take place two centuries apart.

The first, commencing in Spain in 1803, is an attempt by the king of Spain to inoculate the people of his American colonies against smallpox by sending 22 orphan boys carrying the less virulent cowpox in the hope that they will spread a kind of immunity like a vast chain of infection. The second is an attempt by a modern-day U.S. company to do something useful to help eradicate AIDS and other diseases.

So the novel has two sides and the reader moves between each in turn. Both have at the center a woman of some maturity and judgment. In the earlier period, the woman is Dona Isabel Sendales y Gomez, the spinster director of a Spanish orphanage and a pious woman of her time, scarred by smallpox. Alma Heubner also is a pious woman of her time, scarred by nothing so severe, just the common concerns of a 21st century, civic-minded writer living in New England and working on a story about Isabel and her boys.

The moral, helped along by an Emily Dickinson poem, is that altruism is desirable in humans, even if the price is death. Alvarez, the author of five works of fiction, including “In the Time of the Butterflies” and “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents,” explores an elemental segment of the human heart. But the novel stumbles over its own earnestness. In the novel’s most persuasive parts, those that seem most true to life, the modern-day Alma is thinking about and is concerned for her new husband, Richard, who has gone on a journey to help eradicate AIDS in the highlands of her former home in the Dominican Republic. These sections read as if written by a perfectly contented spouse wondering in her imagination what it would be like to have a husband in such a situation. When these scenarios turn violent, they lack the semblance of the real thing.

The events of two centuries ago are well enough imagined, rather like a landscape painting of a formal garden that is still recognizable, though much subdued in design and hue.

In these sections of the novel the love of Isabel for the 22 boys in her charge is evident and sweet. The details of Alvarez’s account are clearly accurate, for her novel is based on a true story, the expedition of Francisco Xavier Balmis, and there is pleasure, as always, in learning how those 200 years before us lived.

But it must be said of this well-meant novel that less could, truly, have been more.

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Anthony Day is the former editor of The Times editorial pages.