Readers almost forgot about Junot Diaz. His 1996 short story collection, Drown, earned praise for its spicy prose -- a mixture of English, Spanish, slang, and street talk -- and its harsh tales of life among Dominican-American immigrants. Even back in 1996, this slim book of stories was seen as a prelude to the great novel the twenty-seven-year-old was already in the midst of writing.
More than a decade passed and no novel was published. Diaz continued to reap the benefits of his early success. He received a Guggenheim fellowship, a professorship at MIT, and other honors, but as Diaz got closer and closer to his fortieth birthday, the absence of the long-awaited novel started to tarnish his once glittering reputation.
How fitting that when the novel finally appeared earlier this month, the plot revolved around a Dominican-American author who struggles for years with his writing without ever publishing a page -- all because of a supposed family curse. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is anything but a cursed book.
The novel starts out mucho caliente right where Drown ended. We are again led by narrator Yunior, another struggling writer (a recurring theme here) who relates the story of his friend Oscar, a nerdy Latino with a disastrous love life and a much-ridiculed attachment to science fiction.
Diaz crafts a complex narrative, full of flashbacks, side stories, and even footnotes that eventually encompass a partisan history of the Dominican Republic and complete accounts of the tribulations of Oscar’s forebears. Much like Philip Roth in American Pastoral and Thomas Mann in Buddenbrooks, Diaz aims to present the full panorama of the rise and fall of a single family over the course of three generations.
If the plot structure is arcane, the language is punchy and direct -- and here, all comparisons with Thomas Mann are out of place. Almost every paragraph mixes in a dose of Spanish or Spanglish. The macho bravado of the street corner permeates every page. Diaz tosses out the F-word and the N-word and a lot of other raw talk with disturbing frequency.
Article comments
1 - Are you kidding?
"Spicy prose?" "Mucho caliente?" Why don't you just add a picture of Carmen Miranda shaking her ass with a fruit hat next to the lede and complete the sterotypical circle? It IS a fantastic book but why not use the same language of praise you'd give another, non-ethnic, writer to say so? Why use stereotypical characterizations of Latinos that convey the very essentialism and categorization Diaz writes against in the novel? "A sinister cabal of superior writers?" Give me a freaking break. And by the way, it's "muy caliente" not "mucho caliente," Superior Writer. Even us spicy Third Worlds have proper grammar.
2 - Natalie Bennett
This article has been selected for syndication to Advance.net , which is affiliated with newspapers around the United States, and to Boston.com. Nice work!