Its not often that a book blows my insides out. They were able to quite frequently when I was younger, and my mind became irreprably twisted on a diet of science fiction and fantasy. At some point I got “old” and realized that the highs I got off those books couldn’t be matched by a real life. Now I read mostly non-fiction and stay away from any strong stuff that could push me off the wagon and require literary methadone treatments. I started doing what I could to seek out the rush, the lust, the magic in the real world. I’m still doing what I can in the real world.
And then I relapsed last week. Hard. My past is why I so connected with the title character in Junot Diaz’s brilliant first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Or rather, I connected at some middle ground between this dateless, hopeless nerd and the consummate ladies man who tells us the story. You’ll have to wait a bit longer for the desi connections. From the back of the book:
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a book that speaks in tongues. This long-awaited novel by Junot Diaz is a masterpiece about our New World, its myths, curses, and bewitching women. Set in America’s navel, New Jersey, and haunted by the vision of Trujillo’s brutal reign over the Dominican Republic, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is radiant with the hard lives of those who leave and also those who stay behind — it is a rousing hymn about the struggle to defy bone-cracking history with ordinary, and extraordinary, love.” Walter Mosley
This book is a “diaspora novel” that transcends both time and reality (its filled with quotes from Lord of the Rings and other books that any real sci-fi nerd would know). As another reviewer stated, to paraphrase, “this is a diaspora novel for people who hate diaspora novels.” Set in New Jersey and the Dominican Republic it is the tale of a several generations of a strong Dominican American family that has been cursed (like all Dominicans) by the Fuku, brought by the “Admiral” who should never be named (but arrived in 1492). It is a curse so powerful that it is pointless to fight it. Diaz uses the life of an overweight science-fiction nerd to propel the story, a roughneck ladies man to narrate it, and a group of strong and beautiful latin women to beat the nerd and the roughneck out of each man and make the sadness of this book worth enduring. It is also a detailed and illuminating account of the brutal 20th century dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo (a.k.a Sauron or The Eye).
It was when I started to see all the desi references in the book that I began to understand what is happening in literature. A great many diaspora communities get to mix here in the U.S. We’ve become a unique literary lab where all the good shit from all the people that come here can start to mix and create some truly good shit that seemed unconcoctable. Here is a scene where Junot Diaz writes about Oscar’s best friends getting laid (without Oscar):
It killed him that they hadn’t thought to include him in their girl heists; he hated Al for inviting Miggs instead of him and he hated Miggs for getting a girl, period. Al getting a girl Oscar could comprehend; Al (real name Alok) was one of those tall Indian prettyboys who would never have been pegged by anyone as a role-playing nerd.
And this scene where Oscar falls in love (for the hundredth time):
She wore tight black stirrup pants like every other girl in the neighborhood and the sexiest underwear she could afford and was a meticulous putter-on of make-up, an intricate bit of multitasking for which Oscar never lost his fascination. She was this peculiar combination of badmash and little girl…
And this scene from the perspective of Oscar’s mother:
Let’s just say that she finally understood why the other boys had given him the name Jack the Ripio; he had what even she knew to be an enormous penis, a Shiva-sized lingam, a destroyer of worlds.
Back in the Dominican Republic Oscar’s mom used to work at a Chinese restaurant owned by a Chinese man named Juan:
Juan, the short-sighted romantic whose girlfriends robbed him blind and who never mastered Spanish (though in later years when he was living in Skokie, Illinois, he would yell at his Americanized grandchildren in his guttural Spanish, and they laughed at him, thinking it Chinese).
I was born in Skokie. I found it beautiful that this novel had a Chinese-Dominican living in a predominantly Indian and Jewish suburb of Chicago. That’s the kind of stuff that makes a brilliant novel. In addition to the references above, the Dominican-American narrator (whose identity is not obvious until the book’s second half) makes several references to his Indian girlfriends. This leads me to believe that Junot Diaz either has a lot of Indian friends or has/is dating an Indian woman. At the very least we know who to thank for getting him his current position as a writing professor at MIT. He thanks her in the book:
Anita Desai (who help land me the MIT gig: I never thanked you enough Anita)
Anita is the mother of Booker Prize winner Kiran. Manish from UltraBrown also tipped me off to the fact that the current NewYorker features a story by Diaz that you can sharpen your teeth on:
You have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain’t a day that passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after-school special…Until one June day Alma discovers that you are also fucking this beautiful freshman girl named Laxmi, discovers the fucking of Laxmi because she, Alma, the girlfriend, opens your journal and reads. (Oh, she had her suspicions.) She waits for you on the stoop, and when you pull up in her Saturn and notice the journal in her hand your heart plunges through you like a fat bandit through a hangman’s trap. You take your time turning off the car. You are overwhelmed by a pelagic sadness. Sadness at being caught, at the incontrovertible knowledge that she will never forgive you. You stare at her incredible legs and between them, to that even more incredible pópola you’ve loved so inconstantly these past eight months. Only when she starts walking over in anger do you finally step out. You dance across the lawn, powered by the last fumes of your outrageous sinvergüenzerÃa. Hey, muñeca, you say, prevaricating to the end. When she starts shrieking, you ask her, Darling, what ever is the matter?… [Link]
The man can write. I need to go back on some non-fiction for a while until I can get myself right again.
I actually just started reading this book on New Years Day, even though I’ve been a Junot fan since High School. I really like it so far. I’d think all Desis would dig Junot’s style. He does a good job capturing the essence of being the kid in an immigrant family. Plus, he’s always writing about Edison and Paterson, New Jersey, the two Brownest places I can think of.
Thanks, Abhi, I just started the book. Diaz has a great collection of short stories too, called Drown. He worked on TBWLOOW for close to 7 years I believe ( a portion of it was used as a short story back in teh New Yorker in 2000). It’s interesting that there’s so much desiness in his writing, probably because of the large population of Dominicans living in Paterson and other areas around NYC, who likely interact with desis fairly often. I don’t know if the same is true of the DR, though — when I lived there, there were only a handful of desis, most attending dentist school — and way more Chinese.
I love the way Diaz plays with language in his short stories. You’ve done a great job of prodding me into getting the novel immediately to read before the next semester mows me down. But this:
…makes me appreciate your blog-posting as well. 😉
Just forget about getting yourself right again. Why would you want to go back to who you were before?
I really wanted to like this book but for the first time I’m finding that my fondness for the subject matter is not matched by my liking for the prose style. Reading these sentences sometimes feels like picking out that one shopping cart that has several wheels askew and bumping/squeaking/bouncing your way all across the Big Box Retail Store’s parking lot during which it seems that everyone else has stopped to stare…
I have to agree with coach diesel, I put myself on a cantankerous-old-brown-man-author diet after my own childhood of devouring Tolkien, Herbert, etc. but it just wasn’t worth it. I went back to the “literary methadone clinic” with William Gibson and China Mieville and never looked back.
Abhi:
Loved your post!
I was blown away by Drown, Junot’s book of short stories, 10 years ago. When I saw Oscar at the Book Expo America last year, I nearly fainted. The book IS fantastic. People are sick of my plugging it by now. I wrote a review of it a while ago.
You might also enjoy Diaz’s hour-long conversation with Tom Ashbrook on NPR’s On Point. Some very interesting questions were brought up.
His style (in the new short story at least) is pungent and explosive, more evocative than disciplined. I don’t think you’re ready / For this jelly…
ripio = trash, debris, useless padding pópola = pussy sinvergüenzerÃa = shamelessness muñeca = doll
I read this book after hearing Diaz speaking on NPR. The book was amazing and the kind you could read several times. His ability to delve into long footnotes was irritating at first, but then reading those was also very educating, un-conventional, and sometimes funny. Its a great read and the desi references surprised me but helped me relate to the character even more, in terms of immigrant connections.
It’s an amazing book. I’ve given away three copies since I read it–including one to a friend whose parents’ families were singled out/ruined by Rafael Trujillo–didn’t really understand the generational psychological impact that had until reading the book. . . but even without the history, man, it’s good …
first heard of the book while watching the author present on a google video:
Perhaps my jelly stands unprepared but I think my reaction to the prose is more a result of being in the B.R. Meyers camp.
Is there any American author that really looks at America? Looks at the dark side of the American dream, how modern capitalism has destroyed the principles of the American founders etc. This book appears to be an exercise in narcissism like the books of Philip Roth, Bellow and Lahiri.
If you have to read Diaz, read his short story called “How to date a halfie”. Don’t know if it isi ncluded in Drown, his debut collection.
I read TBLOOW in India last month soon after reading Danticat’s book Brother, I’m Dying. What a contrast. Great books about a part of thr world we know so little about. Reading TBLOOW, i felt a similar sensation to reading Midnight’s Chldren; that something had been changed in how books that matter will be written
Me again. In case my previous note was indicative…Danticat’s book was brilliant too.
Not modern capitalism, but try Charles Sellers’ “The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815-1846.” Non-fiction.
Neale, yeah the Danticat book was a great memoir.
Junot dated an Indian girl. He knows. Plus, desi ladies have a special place in their heart for him–he looks like one of us! Even my mother said so.
That’s not unique to America — it’s what the UK has become, and the British novel for the last twenty years has been in ferment because of it.
But thanks for the review, sounds great.
Abhi, I just read this too, and loved it. I was surprised, but then not really, by the desi references.
I also just read David Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and kind of got excited that he had a friend named Shalini. How lame am I?
I requested this book from my library after reading this post, and finally got a copy. It’s great. I loved the footnotes. My favorite line– But you can’t regret the life you didn’t lead (p 31).