The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

——- ——- ——-, said the Mongoose.

“Write what you know,” the older writer will tell the rookie. The rookie’s classic response: “what the hell do I know? I’ve had my nose in a book my whole life.”

Well, then, write about books.

Junot Diaz’s first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,¹ is very much a book about books. A multi-generational saga about the de Leon clan, our protagonist is the hapless nerd Oscar, who’s read Lord of the Rings about a million times and pens his own sci-fi novels when he isn’t playing D&D. Some of the most important words Oscar speaks in the book actually belong to one of Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Books and words matter: they’re Oscar’s friend when nobody else will be, the narrator Yunior’s a writer himself, and check out this footnote.² But there’s some things words can’t touch.

Voids fill the book, either in names redacted or words too important to be set on the page. House of Mirth has a similar concern with the ineffable, those things that are best unspoken, but Diaz builds his whole novel on it. With the introductory chapter, the (presumed) gringo reader gets a crash course on fukú, “generally a curse or a doom of some kind.” To talk about fukú is to invite your doom – some Candyman shit. But there are safeguards:

…anytime a fukú reared its many heads there was only one way to prevent disaster from coiling around you, only one surefire counterspell tha twould keep you and your family safe. Not surprisingly, it was a word. A simple word (followed usually by a vigorous crossing of index fingers).

Zafa.

There’s the paradox of writing.  Words are limited, but they can protect you from anything. They don’t protect Oscar’s mother, Beli, from a hellacious beating. “All that can be said is that it was the end of language, the end of hope,” and watch how he uses parallelism to pair up those two things, language and hope. A typical author move, believing so much in these words. Naturally I ate it up.

What I didn’t eat up – at least at first – was the narration. Read any review of the book and you’ll see some praise for its voice.³ It was the same thing when he gave a reading at Skidmore, all these tweedy townies asking him about his “unique voice.” Well, I was at that reading, and I heard his voice, which is maybe why I have a problem in the first place. Junot Diaz reads his own work like you’re a six year old and it’s bedtime. Everything is overpronounced, there’s a half second pause between every word, and the whole pitch of it just annoyed me. But by the time I managed to expunge Diaz’s fussy voice and replace it with something I liked better, I was able to engage with the writing, which is fast, funny, and perceptive. Fast especially – I was grateful to get a quick read after Don DeLillo’s (who also gave a Skidmore reading) congested White Noise.

I bet you Oscar Wao lands on a high school summer reading list in a few years. It’s got it all: easy reading, “issues,” some multiculturalism (I don’t think we ever read a book just about white people in middle->high school), and an identifiable protagonist. It’s the kind of book you can recommend to friends who “don’t do reading.” An unabashed crowd pleaser with some serious heart, Wao doesn’t match Drown’s grit, but it introduces a whole new aspect to Diaz, who establishes some serious dork credentials, here.

But if you do pick it up, read slow. It’ll be another decade before he finishes the next book.

¹ Title’s an homage to a Hemingway story, The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, and the Wao (Oscar’s real last name is de Leon) is a corruption of Oscar Wilde’s last name

² Wao’s as footnote heavy as a DFW piece. These usually provide some context on the Dominican Republic.  Here’s one discussing Jesus de Galindez, an intellectual who wrote a dissertation denouncing the DR Dictator, Rafael Trujillo. “What is it with Dictators and Writers, anyway? … Rushdie claims that tyrants and scribblers are natural antagonists, but I think that’s too simple; it lets writers off pretty easy. Dictators, in my opinion, just know competition when they see it. Same with writers. Like, after all, recognizes like.

³ “What a voice Yunior has,” says the SF Chronicle. “For what is most striking about his writing is his voice, and what is most striking about his voice is the audacity, bounce, and brio of its bilingualism,” gushes The Nation.