A Literary Dance, a Merengue of Words : YO! by Julia Alvarez; Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill $18.95, 320 pages

There are three ways of looking at Julia Alvarez’s lively and engaging novel:

1. It’s like a second-stage airburst--the kind of fireworks whose first explosion is only a prelude, sending invisible rockets out to go pop! pop! pop! around a wider perimeter.

The first blast, in this case, was Alvarez’s debut novel, “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” (Algonquin Books, 1991). It was the story of four sisters whose well-to-do family fled political repression in the Dominican Republic in 1960. One of the sisters, Yolanda (Yo), has turned out to be literary. As “Yo!” opens, she is in her middle 30s and has just published a novel rather like “Garcia Girls,” to her family’s consternation.

When Joan Didion remarked that writers are always selling someone out, she was talking about the victims of journalism--not rhino-skinned celebrities but little people who come to realize that their only mark on history will be a few unflattering words in print.

OK, Alvarez says. Nobody’s satisfied with Yo’s version? The real stories remain untold? Fine. Here’s your chance. Tell.

And tell they do, pop! pop! pop!--Yo’s parents and sisters and aunts, the resentful daughter of the family maid and the cousin whisked back to the “D.R.” for life because her parents were alarmed by indiscreet references to boys in Yo’s high school journals. So do Yo’s favorite English professor, poor Dominicans whose jobs depend on her annual visits, her best friend, one of her lovers, her third husband and a stalker obsessed by book-jacket photos of her.

A truly extended family, we might say.

2. It’s a joke, a dance--maybe a merengue--and a display of writerly virtuosity. Who, after all, is really telling all these stories, in such a variety of moods and voices? Who has subtitled some of them (“setting,” “point of view,” etc.) as if they were exercises in the creative writing classes Yo teaches at a New England college? Why, Yo’s prototype, Alvarez herself--just as the fictional novelist Nathan Zuckerman and all his critics are none other than Philip Roth.

Alvarez, it must be said, is less insistent than Roth on having the last word--and the anger of Yo’s critics seldom hangs on as bitterness. Indeed, irony gives way to warmth and affection almost too easily in the middle of the novel, where Yo’s influence on others is consistently inspiring.

In time, irony makes a comeback. A former student discovers that Yo has reworked one of his stories as her own. And her lover, visiting her in the Dominican Republic when one of her uncles is running for president, is dismayed to find that she is inextricably involved with her family: for “it’s like he has fallen in with the Mafia or something”--though she can see the injustices of Dominican society as clearly as he. “Yo is as American as apple pie,” he had thought. “Well, let’s say, as American as a Taco Bell taco.”

3. It’s a portrait of the artist. Yo is what all these stories have in common. Seen from so many angles, she gradually appears whole--skinny, intense, uncertain yet focused, childless yet fertile, volatile yet private, a one-woman cultural collision who believes both in feminism and in the “spirit water” and voodoo spells of her native island.

4. Did I say only three? It’s also a blessing--belatedly bestowed on Yo by her father, who beat her savagely when she was 5 because her storytelling (in the home of a neighbor, one of the Dominican Republic regime’s most feared generals) threatened to expose the father’s underground activity. Now this most severe of critics tries to erase the doubt the beating inflicted on her. It is her “destino to tell stories,” he reassures Yo as, in his voice, we hear Alvarez reassuring herself.