Junot Diaz, "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

A month or so ago I came across a description of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) that read much like this, from wikipedia: 

The book chronicles the life of Oscar de León, an overweight Dominican boy growing up in Paterson, New Jersey, who is obsessed with science fiction and fantasy novels and with falling in love, as well as a curse that has plagued his family for generations.

I wondered, reading this, why I did not know this book, and why I had not read it. It sounds like exactly my kind of thing. My long-contemplated, likely never-to-be-realized project for a more realistic novel would focus on a would-be fantasy writer who spends most of his time in worlds of his own imagining, and I thought maybe this would be such a book.

It is not. 

It is, basically, yet another multi-generation chronicle of an immigrant family, the kind of book that the American literary establishment loves so much. The main character is actually not Oscar Wao, but the special energy of the Dominican community that divides its time between the Old Country and Paterson, New Jersey. The remarkable thing about the book, as the more astute critics noted, is the language Diaz uses to capture this energy. The characters "code switch" between a high-energy patois full of Spanish and Spanglish words and a more conventional, almost literary English, and the flow of both is regularly interrupted by references to science fiction, fantasy, and comic books. It is unlike anything else I have ever read, and sometimes it is quite powerful.

For me, though, the book had a couple of serious problems. First, the special energy of the Dominicans turns out to be almost entirely about sex. Diaz portrays Dominicans as utterly sex-obsessed; from the Dominican standpoint the thing that makes Oscar a weirdo is not his sci-fi obsessions or constant references to Dungeons & Dragons, but his virginity. 

Anywhere else his triple-zero batting average with the ladies might have passed without comment, but this is a Dominican kid we're talking about, in a Dominican family: dude was supposed to have Atomic Level G, was supposed to be pulling in the bitches with both hands.

Dominicans are, we are led to believe, a people of great passion:

To be called boycrazy in a country like Santo Domingo is a singular distinction; it means that you can sustain infatuations that would reduce your average northamericano to cinders.

Dominicans never get enough sex; after getting dumped by his girlfriend because she caught him cheating with one of her friends, the narrator says:

What I should have done was check myself into Bootie-Rehab. But if you thought I was going to do that, then you don't know Dominican men.

There are so many references to the huge breasts and cocks of Dominicans that it really started to bother me, and I kept thinking that if an Anglo writer had penned any of this he would have been cancelled for racism.

The story seems to have an interesting, meta-fictional component. It eventually turns out that the semi-omniscient narrator of most of the book is a friend of Oscar's named Yunior. Yunior is a much more conventional Dominican man, restless, sex-obsessed, a great dancer and wildly successful lover. Most observers think that Oscar is based on Diaz himself, but rather than telling the story from his own perspective he imagined a Dominican man who was everything he was not and had him describe Oscar's troubled existence. It was an interesting choice, and one could spend way too much time pondering the psychology that lies behind it; at any rate it suggests some serious complications in Diaz's relationship to the sexuality he attributes to his fellow Dominicans.

The other thing that puzzled me was the strange narrowness of the characters' world. They live in the multi-ethinic stew of Paterson and the main characters eventually attend a state university, but the Anglo and African-American worlds hardly make an appearance. The only other ethnic group that gets more than a brief mention is Puertoricans, always written as one word, and they appear mostly when somebody compares the hotness of puertorican chicas to that of Dominicanas. Where is the rest of the universe?

Oscar is supposed to be a big-time nerd, but he seems to have no concept of the actual fascinating history of Paterson; you're telling me that a kid this nerdy has no idea that the buildings around him used to make railroad locomotives and the original Colt revolver? The characters live a town that has been home to generations of immigrants going back to its founding in the 1790s, but they neither know nor care. 

To me, the characters' ignorance about Patterson's history is not a minor, pedantic note, but a symbol of what bothers me about books like this: the insistence on the specialness of their characters' history. I have enjoyed books by Jewish writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer about Jewish immigrants, but I eventually got tired of all the self-back-patting about how special and wonderful they were. Junot Diaz portrays Dominican immigrants as special and wonderful in their own way, using such charged language that you almost believe him.

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is an impressive book, the sort of high-wire writing performance that makes you marvel when it doesn't collapse. But I didn't like it very much.