I’ve never been a big fan of the American fiction of the suffering middle and upper classes, the lost academics, the angst of the suburbs, another (male) mid-life crisis. It has never gripped me. I don’t get why Cheever, Updike, Roth, Bellow and their compatriots are so high in the pantheon of American letters, except that those who assign such rankings like to read about themselves. As in the world of finance, and other non fact based professions, self reinforcing coteries assemble, praising in circular fashion the efforts of others. A tornado forms. Others see it, and think, “Oh! There must be something there! Many are saying so.”
What interests me, fictionally and otherwise, are those on the margins, those who have more than their mournfulness to deal with. Let me read the odd balls of Raymond Carver, the labor stiffs in Harvey Swados, the mostly wrecked westerners of Tom McGuane, the punched out and rolled over Irish of William Kennedy’s Albany. Sailors and wanderers in Melville are those I want to know more about, the dark street prowlers of Georges Simenon, the confused and confounded lovers of Mary Gaitskill
It’s not just that they are on the margins. I can do without Burroughs’ marginalized, or Bukowski’s. Too much drug and alkie reportage for me. It’s the folks who’ve been hit upside the head before they’re born and yet stagger to a standing position and keep pushing forward, those who take the little bit given them, of courage, wealth, hope and do something way beyond the expected that move me.
So Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” enters my shelf of books to remember and reread, to open my eyes to lives I’ve barely sensed, if that. It’s a book to remind me of lost histories of human cruelty and those who survive it.
Several stories are told, each sliding into place as the pages turn, each adding portions of their own lives to the mysterious thread that connects them, beyond family, to the curse of the Antilles, the fukú americanus . Oscar’s begins first. Oscar is a fat freak. The Patterson, New Jersey born, only boy of a refugee from Trujillo’s Dominican Republic. Oscar doesn’t fit the manly requirements of Dominican manhood and grows up adolescence and through college immersed in fantasy fiction and games, unable to start a conversation any girl would enter into. Each that rejects him is another to be yearned for.
His sister Lola is introduced next, and their formidable mother, in an extraordinary scene of breast examination the mother demands of the daughter, a scene that sets the stage for the mother’s life still to be revealed, the daughter’s anger at the mother and the reckless choices she runs to. We go with her to the DR, sent to La Inca, the grandmother, where the story began, the fuku was first felt.
The language of narrative and dialog is inventive. Real and fresh in the best way. Do all Dominicans in the US refer to themselves as “nigger?” No matter. Characters in the book do. It sounds as if we are evesdropping. The peppering of the language with spanglish is mostly decodable, though I wonder if a reader without much Spanish would find it as transparent as I did.
“For the record, that summer our girl caught a cuerpazo so berserk that only a pornographer or a comic-book artist could have designed it with a clear conscience. Every neighborhood has it tetúa, but Belli could have put them all to shame, she was the Tetúa Suprema: her tetas were globes so impossibly titanic they made generous souls pity their bearer and drove every straight male in the vicinity to reevaluate his sorry life. She had the breasts of Luba (35DDD). And what about that supersonic culo that could tear words right out of niggers’ mouths, pull windows from their motherfucking frames? A culo que jalaba más que una junta de buey.”
Yes, there is plenty of salaciousness and shall we say, street talk. But there is this as well, wonderful, unexpected images that immediately liven up the reading imagination.
“That endless monsoon rain of praise had quickened in him the bamboo of entitlement.”
or, “She was a girl so tall your leg bones ached just looking at her.
So dark it was if the creatrix had, in her making, blinked. ”
Díaz adds footnotes throughout the book, in one of the oddest “mash-ups” of fact and fiction I’ve read. At first they seem odd, perhaps pretentious, but soon they work, adding the historical background of the “Trujillato,” the bloody 30 year dictatorship into which the grandmother and mother were born, from which they barely escaped. They help us remember the US occupations of the island, twice thank you.
As you begin to see the fukú at work and to anticipate the end of Oscar’s short and wondrous life you are filled with dread, of course. You like this fat, geeky boy, so out of place in his neighborhood, in the world at large. You want it to end well and sense that it won’t. But it does, in a way. You aren’t entirely unhappy. It is Oscar, after all, who when he has a choice to make, makes it, caught perhaps in the fantasies he has lived so long, or guided perhaps by the values that undergird such fantasies — that love is to die for, that good triumphs over evil.
I’m glad to know Oscar Wao, and the funny secret of his last name, and to understand the homage given him by Lola’s long lasting lover, never to be partner, the author, fictional of course, of the book.
What an eye opening read!
