What happens when you realize all you worked for is meaningless? When you are this close to achieving your goals, only to realize that you have betrayed everything you cherish? Cleyvis Natera’s second novel, The Grand Paloma Resort, explores these questions and more through the relationship between two sisters, Laura and Elena, as well as the staff and guests of a luxurious resort in the Dominican Republic. 

Laura, a local woman from an impoverished community in the Dominican Republic, has risen by sheer determination to become manager of the luxury resort encroaching on her family’s home and is on the brink of a promotion she’s been working for all her life. But when Elena, who already doesn’t meet her sister’s high expectations, makes a fateful error, Laura decides to teach her a lesson—one which has repercussions not just on the two sisters or the resort, but on the community at large. Set over seven days on the coast and in the mountains of the Dominican Republic, menaced by an approaching hurricane, The Grand Paloma Resort is a searing exploration of how late stage capitalism impacts race, class, families, and communities, if not our very souls. 

I first met Cleyvis Natera at a residency at the Virginia Center for the Arts when she was working on her debut novel, Neruda on the Park, which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, among other accolades. The two of us bonded over our love of the Dominican Republic, where Natera spent her early years, and where I was imprisoned during my adolescence at a now-defunct religious reform school. Since then, Natera has gone on to win awards and accolades including the International Latino Book Award, and fellowships from Pen America, Bread Loaf, and Kenyon. She’s also a Fulbright Specialist, and teaches at Barnard and Montclair State University. We spoke in the early summer over Zoom, a few weeks before Natera announced Ballantine will be publishing a sequel set in the Paloma Resort universe. We discussed writing about class, how selling the book on proposal changed her writing process, and allowing stories to end with hope.

Deirdre Sugiuchi: How old were you when you left the Dominican Republic, and how has your experience visiting the Dominican Republic changed since then? 

Cleyvis Natera: When I left, I was 10 years old. My family didn’t have very much money. We weren’t people that were going to the beach or going to hotels or vacationing. The first time I saw a beach was after my mother traveled to the United States—my first conscious memory was going with one of my mom’s friends, when I was seven years old.

The next time that I went to the Dominican Republic was after college. I was in my twenties, and, when I went, I wanted to go to a resort. I love resorts—I love being in a place where everything is tailored to your needs. The pool is there, the beach is there, the food is there whenever you need it. Massages on demand. What is there not to love? 

However, being a local, I think, and because my class has changed so much since I left the Dominican Republic, very often when I travel to these resorts, I’m aware of the class distinction and who is serving versus who’s vacationing there. I’m also really aware, oddly, about the fact that had I not immigrated, I’m not convinced that I would be able to partake in that kind of activity. There’s something that feels subversive about the fact that my immigrant dream enabled me to live a life in the Dominican Republic that probably wouldn’t have been available to me.

I travel a lot to the Caribbean with my husband, not just to the D.R. I love talking to workers. I find myself often interviewing and talking to people casually or more formally about what it’s like to work in the resort, and what it’s like to tend to tourists and to rich people. Some of those conversations really aided in me writing this book. 

DS: You have a number of characters all related to this resort somehow. But at the core it’s two sisters…and they’re really complicated. Why are you drawn towards writing complicated people? 

CN: After writing my first book, Neruda on the Park, I realized I’m obsessed with relationships and the way that grief and loss affects people. One of the things that I’m most interested in is the way grief turns people into monsters, and sometimes lingers in such a way that it deteriorates the person’s personality, or even the potential of who they could have been. I also was thinking about the ways in which love can sometimes be the only thing that can save you, but it can also be the thing that can harm you, if you’re not very careful.

It took a while for me to realize that this [was about] two sisters. I wanted to test these two women who have very different ideals, and put them on this pressure cooker of this resort…and put them into a situation that would force them to reckon with both their relationships and who they are in the world, and who they want to be in the future. I realized that in order to do service to what I’m trying to do in this book, which is really to talk about the complex of a resort as a microcosm of the whole world of capitalism. And the only way you can do it is to have this kind of multiphonic narrative. You couldn’t really do it with one or two characters. It has to keep shifting. One of the things that I was committed to was [not] compromising on their complexities. I think all of us are very complicated and contradictory, and there’s ways in which I think life also makes us complicated depending on our station.

I think we don’t talk about how, in some ways, wealth can enable you to have almost a more stable personality, or to be very different and live more up to your ideals or values. I think about that a lot, the ways in which wealth and my station in life has changed so drastically from the time that I was a child in the Dominican Republic, and the ways it has enabled me to do amazing things like write books and even talk to you. 

DS: Obviously this book’s in conversation with The White Lotus, but from a completely different perspective. Can you discuss?

CN: In 2020 I had finished writing Neruda on the Park. [My agent] PJ [Mark] was ready to send it to market, but we realized we couldn’t because there was a pandemic, and the publishing industry had screeched to a halt. So, I started writing these short stories from the perspective of employees in a resort. I knew that the central thread of the story was the fact that they were all in service to the resort in one way or another—and then in 2022, when the first season of The White Lotus came out, I was so upset! I was like, “They beat me to it. They stole my idea!” And I remember talking to my agent and he was like, “This is not a bad thing.”

I actually sold this book as a novel proposal. I hadn’t finished writing the whole book. In some ways, I think the fact that the book is so clearly in conversation with this social phenomenon that has become The White Lotus, but is very centrally concerned with privilege from a different perspective, aided in the speed with which the book was picked up by my editor. 

DS: You teach writing. Did writing this book on proposal and selling it on proposal change the way you wrote the book? Do you think you’ll teach differently afterwards?

CN: Yes, to both. I had never outlined a book before and so it gave me a lot of comfort to have an outline because every time I came to my laptop I had a job to do—my first book was a 15 year journey, and if there was one thing I wasn’t going to do, it was take another decade or more on my next book. But I think I also learned that even when you want to force a story to do something, the narrative has its own heart and its own energy. 

After writing this book with an outline, now I understand not just that plot is critical, but in some ways the best plot moves through the character—it isn’t two separate things. Making the outline made me think about character motivation and character desire and instinct in a different way. With my first book it was almost an iterative process, where you lay down the foundation of the book and then you inject some propulsion and some tension. With this book, I think just by the nature of me having a strong sense of where I wanted the story to go, I became a lot more capable or maybe more competent in injecting some of those elements into the character. What’s activating the plot is the character and not the story.

DS: This book is inspired by current events in the Dominican Republic, particularly how the troubles in Haiti impact the Dominican Republic. There was a scene—and this is not a spoiler, but a moment—where you describe Black people, Haitians, being picked up and thrown into vans to be deported. It was so similar to things happening here.

CN: I feel like really good fiction that is concerned with telling the truth about whatever it is that we’re obsessed with is always going to resonate with a present moment in the future. For example, the first time that I learned about the Parsley Massacre of 1937, where tens of thousands of Haitians were massacred at the command of the Dominican government, was through Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones. I was in my twenties. And now, I think about the fact that I went to school until fifth grade in the Dominican Republic, and my grandparents, and my father, who was much older than my mother, had all lived through Trujillo, yet at no point did I learn about [the massacre] through my family or through my schooling. It was through literature that I came to understand this really important aspect of my country’s history. I also learned that as an immigrant in the United States. 

When I started traveling back from the United States, I would often see my country through the eyes of that book. In some ways it made me more empathetic to what I was witnessing. I think sometimes when you live through injustice and the horrifying treatment of people, you are desensitized. You almost don’t see it. I think Danticat taught me to pay more attention as a human being, which has really aided me as a writer.

One of the things I thought about when I decided I was going to write this book was that I couldn’t write without talking about what’s happening to Haitian people in the Dominican Republic. It’s a horrifying situation there, especially when you think about the deportation of Dominicans of Haitian descent. Birthright was removed as a right for Haitian people in the Dominican Republic—and that just happened in the last decade. Every time I would go to the Dominican Republic, I would think about [The Farming of Bones] and about how far and also how close we were to the incidents that happened, and the way history has a way of remaining alive, taking over the present moment unless you’re really vigilant. 

DS: Yes. We’re seeing it right now. However, the question I want to end on is: Can you discuss the role of hope in your writing?

CN: Oh my goodness. Thank you for that question. I feel like I’m such a hopeful person in real life. Sometimes it is very difficult to be hopeful in literature because literature requires us to be really truthful about logic in a way that’s not like real life. I think hopeful people, optimistic people like you and I, often diverge from reality to remain hopeful. Ending this book on a hopeful note was probably the hardest thing I could do. 

I knew the way I wanted to end the book, especially as it comes to these two women who have suffered so much loss, yet who also make decisions that are just so disturbing. But then I also was thinking about how important hope is in this story, especially because I’m also cognizant of fiction coming out of the Caribbean, and especially the way in which I think many of us [writers] are being truthful to the realities of locals in our islands, when it comes to privilege and tourism, class, and money—it’s sometimes difficult for our stories to end on a hopeful note. 

In a way, for me, it was like, challenge accepted: There has to be a way in which I can find redemption for these characters. There has to be a way in which I can bring that optimism and hopefulness that is part of my life, the way that my life is guided by this idea that the impossible can be possible, that beautiful things are ahead, even during the most ugly and difficult times.