Absorbency
The opening imagery of the novel is a meditation upon the difference between rich people and normal folk. The protagonist of the story is a wedding planner for the super-elite of New York City so she would know these things and she identifies the napkins as the locus of this diversion. But she isn’t really talking about napkins even on a literal level. She is talking about absorbency. The napkins at a rich people wedding are made of such quality stuff that spilling liquid is never a problem relative to staining because the napkins will absorb the liquid well before such a tragedy could even occur. The symbol here is not napkins, but absorbency in the sense of wealth allows for the absorption of all the problems of common folk that can become, in a sense, a tragedy.
Hurricane Maria
A major even which occurs in the narrative is the actual historical event that was the landfall of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico in 2017. The fictional treatment of this event follows the real-life timeline involving the anemic federal response to the devastating disaster under the management—for lack of a better word—of the Trump administration. It is the actual historical account which allows for the fiction to situate Hurricane Maria as a symbol of how natural disasters despite their random provenance do not inflict damage equitably as one might think.
Noir
Interestingly enough, Olga describes the patron of a bar called Noir using almost exactly the same language that Dale Gribble uses in an episode of King of the Hill to describe hipsters who have taken over a suddenly gentrified neighborhood that used to be the low-income domain of Hispanic families. Dale identifies hipsters as people “who walk slowly because they’ve got nowhere to be man” whereas Olga muses that Noir is populated by” regulars who seemed to have nowhere to be and no one who cared if they made it there.” The bar is thus situated as a symbol of the negating cultural influence of gentrification. Note that while noir is usually translated as black or dark, it can also convey a sense of mood like somber, bleak, or joyless.
Sweet Fried Plantains
Olga has a symbol all her own. Or, maybe, there are lots of people like Olga who feel the same way. It would be a cultural thing that has not yet made it into the mainstream, if so. But for Olga, definitely, the cooking banana known as the sweet plantain is, when fried, a symbolic incarnation of feeling a soothing sense of serenity. To eat the sweet fried plantain is feel, however briefly, that all is right with the world are at least your place in it.
“Spice It Up!”
This is the title of a reality show that Olga was to host. Only the pilot episode was ever filmed and it was aired just once in the worst possible time slot for such a show. The failure of the show to take off was due to focus groups in which middle-America whites reacted with a strong negative response to Latina from New York coming into their homes and telling them what to do with their wedding plans.
