The Long Puzzling Absence of Junot Díaz
Sam Sacks
| The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao By Junot Díaz Riverhead, 2007 |
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Though it perhaps ought not be said in mixed company, there’s no getting around the fact that young people run the world. True, it’s old people who have the money, and the positions of power, and the nuclear launch codes. And it’s true that the decisions made by old people from their positions of power have an unavoidable, disproportionate importance in the lives of the Earth’s inhabitants. Nevertheless, young people run the world. Money, prestige, influence: it’s been axiomatic for millennia that these sops are dismal substitutes for the basic commodity possessed by all healthy young people—vitality, energy, waxing, superabundant quantities of whatever it is that makes life life. Old people—and oldness does not always correspond to age, although it usually and predictably does—simply have less of the stuff. They can propose changes, but not effect them; pass laws, but not enforce them; start wars, but never fight or win them. The objectively right thing, then, would be for those with diminishing energy to recognize that fact and stand aside. Work still, of course, but do so in the periphery and during the off hours, and dedicate the bulk of the time to aiding the young people who really run things, but are in dire want of experience and wisdom.
| That this is usually not done is evinced routinely, among other places (the Senate chamber comes to mind), in our nation’s literary organs and bookstores, which are apparently obliged to reserve an unholy amount of real estate for the venerable elder statesmen of the world of belles lettres. And we’re not talking about symbolic attention, not well-deserved accolades and homage being bestowed upon accomplished septua and octogenarians; on the contrary, this is a serious expenditure in money, publicity, and the public’s precious, ever-decreasing reading time on weak work sired in frailty. The abysmal irony is that these books are invariably about the loss of prowess and potency that accompanies old age, while their authors’ tedious, maundering prose serve as object lessons for that very theme. Old writers may perhaps conceive of epics, but they can’t write them, and we’re inundated instead with the exhausted, dithering, nearly indistinguishable latest from John Updike, Philip Roth, Alice Munro, Ward Just, Louis Begley—and though it’s painful to say—Toni Morrison, John Barth, William Trevor, Larry McMurtry, Gore Vidal, and many other sometime titans. These books are reflexively called “affecting” and “elegiac” and are forthwith disseminated throughout the public sphere where they do about as much good as moldy produce. |  |
But just as men and women in decline should get out of the way, younger writers are obliged to harness their powers and summit the heights left unoccupied by the passing generation. Naturally, this is a far more burdensome expectation (though also an exhilarating one). It means there can be no dickering around in a protracted adolescence (a privilege only allotted to citizens of the world’s wealthiest countries), no indulging in tricks and frathouse inside jokes, no marketing facetious, know-it-all memoirs at the grand old age of 22, and no rationalizing away insufficiencies with the craven philosophy that all books are always failures. Young writers have to believe that if they don’t write imperishable masterpieces, no imperishable masterpieces are going to be written—and furthermore they have to think it matters one way or the other.
Sympathize with Junot Díaz, then, smart as it’s possible to be, enormously talented, raised with a fluency in both the English of the library and of the street, and adopted as the favorite son of that most magnanimous of surrogates, The New Yorker—and consequently freighted with the heaviest possible portion of the burden to be great. Díaz’s 1996 debut, Drown, a collection of loosely related stories, is by now something of a byword and sine qua non amongst people who read short stories, for the simple reason that it is written in a voice almost nobody had encountered before, and has no peer to this day. It’s not so much that the stories are great—though most are very good—but that they were rendered in an idiom that seemed newly minted and utterly unique. Through his alter ego Yunior, who either features in the stories or else seems to narrate them, Díaz blends formal, bookish English with east coast Latin-American slang, and the mixture is vulgar, cerebral, funny, and always animated. He writes about the Dominican Republic and the émigré neighborhoods of urban New Jersey, and as it is for other writers who have defined a setting with a voice—James T. Farrell for Chicago or Eudora Welty for Mississippi, for instance—there’s no mistaking one of Díaz’s paragraphs. This is from the start of the collection’s first story, “Ysrael”:
Rafa and I stayed with our tíos, in a small wooden house just outside Ocoa; rosebushes blazed around the yard like compass points and the mango tree spread out deep blankets of shade where we could rest and play dominos, but the campo was nothing like our barrio in Santo Domingo. In the campo there was nothing to do, no one to see. You didn’t get television or electricity and Rafa, who was older and expected more, woke up every morning pissy and dissatisfied. He stood out on the patio in his shorts and looked out over the mists that gathered like water, at the brucal trees that blazed like fires on the mountain. This, he said, is shit.
Worse than shit, I said.
Yeah, he said, and when I get home, I’m going to go crazy—chinga all my girls and then chinga everyone else’s.
The stories in Drown have the polish of tireless revision, but what makes them convincing it that their vernacular narration feels altogether effortless. These are, so it feels, autobiographical works, personally felt and naturally expressed, and therefore not only are they rarely boring but the characters in them feel quite real. And at the end of the book, almost like a teaser for things to come, is the long story “Negocios,” a perceptive, impressively empathetic work about the dealings (and as concerns the family left in the Dominican Republic, double-dealings) of a newly-arrived immigrant who works his way from Miami to New York, a story that seemed to offer a glimpse of the sort of novel Díaz was going to give us and was, no one doubted, hard at work finishing.
And then, as everyone knows, silence. Or almost silence—a few dutiful contributions to The New Yorker (one of which, “Nilda,” is Díaz’s best short story), but no more books for eleven years. The effect, oddly, was to further raise the significance of Drown in the eyes of the watchful, and to give it a weird, Rimbaudian luster, except that Díaz had not forsworn literature for business and venereal diseases but was, for most of that time, actually teaching creative writing. (Whether teaching creative writing yields the same results as forswearing literature is a conclusion pending a few more years of data, but it seems ominously plausible in Díaz’s case.)
The problem is that Díaz could no longer write principally for himself and his friends and family, primarily concerned with giving apt expression to his most intimate memories, loves, fears, and convictions. No, after the success of Drown (a success confined to insular magazine circles, perhaps, but no less intense for that) he was expected to write on behalf of everyone: Dominicans and Dominican-Americans, certainly; all Latin-Americans, whose voices in the art world don’t come close to representing their presence in the country; women, for whom Díaz has shown a particular wish to portray sensitively; social-conscious liberals, who want persuasive spokesmen for agreed-upon ideals (this is an era in which it is generally considered that important books must be political); and anyone who read Drown and was excited by the intelligence and vitality it appeared to promise for the future.
That’s an immense amount of expectations to satisfy, and demands an outlook fundamentally different—or so it must feel—than the one that inspired the high-resolution stories about Díaz’s childhood neighborhood and extended family. In the interviews Díaz has granted over the interim he has sounded distinctly flustered when the invariable question about the second book is put to him, but it’s not hard to intuit what he can’t very well say: something great and epochal was wanted from him, and he didn’t know how to write it with the material that most interests him.
Now, at last, the silence has been broken with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and the final product, evidently the subject of at least seven years of composition and tinkering (a sizeable chunk of it appeared under the same title in The New Yorker in December, 2000), displays all of Díaz’s virtuosity in bringing his settings and characters to life with crackling demotic prose, and also demonstrates his struggle to coherently fill a larger canvas while a multitude of people peek over his shoulder, deeply invested in his final product.
The novel centers on the fat, hapless, virginal Oscar de Leon of Paterson, New Jersey, who comes of age doing “the usual ghettonerd things”:
He collected comic books, he played role-playing games, he worked at a hardware store to save money for an outdated Apple IIe. He was an introvert who trembled with fear every time gym class rolled around. He watched nerd shows like “Doctor Who” and “Blake’s 7,” could tell you the difference between a Veritech fighter and a Zentraedi battle pod, and he used a lot of huge-sounding nerd words like “indefatigable” and “ubiquitous” when talking to niggers who would barely graduate from high school.
And most of all Oscar fixates on sex, the very thing that his appearance and personality ensure will always be denied him. Much of the novel is Oscar’s Calvary, and we follow from station to station of doomed crushes, disillusionments, and public humiliations (including a suicide attempt). That this worn path is entertaining is due entirely to Diaz’s rapid, high-decibel, often hilarious exposition (this novel is again narrated by Yunior, only timidly used here—he pops up in person now and again and then disappears omnisciently into the background). Here, Oscar has graduated from college, moved back home, and become a teacher at his Catholic high school, Don Bosco Tech:
Had Don Bosco, since last we visited, been miraculously transformed by the spirit of Christian brotherhood? Had the eternal benevolence of the Lord cleansed the students of their bile? Negro, please. The only change that Oscar saw was in the older brothers, who all seemed to have acquired the inbred Innsmouth “look”; everything else (like white arrogance and the self-hate of people of color) was the same, and a familiar gleeful sadism still electrified the halls. Oscar wasn’t great at teaching, his heart wasn’t in it, and all the boys of all grades and dispositions shitted on him effusively. Students laughed when they spotted him in the halls. Pretended to hide their sandwiches. Asked in the middle of lectures if he ever got laid, and no matter how he responded they guffawed mercilessly. How demoralizing was that? And every day he found himself watching the “cool” kids torture the crap out of the fat, the ugly, the smart, the poor, the dark, the black, the unpopular, the African, the immigrant, the strange, the femenino, the gay—and in every one of these clashes he must have been seeing himself. Sometimes he tried to reach out to the school’s whipping boys—You ain’t alone, you know?—but the last thing a freak wants is a helping hand from another freak.
The novel’s title is an overt reference to the great Ernest Hemingway story (and workshop darling) “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” In this story, Macomber finally asserts his independence from his vicious, termagant wife (the liberation is symbolized in his killing of a lion), and likewise in Díaz’s novel, Oscar will free himself—with an equally lethal result—from his status anxiety, loneliness, spineless fatalism, and of course his virginity. He begins this process while on vacation in the Dominican Republic, where he befriends and falls in love with a middle-aged former prostitute named Yvón.
But to elevate his book above its flat nerd-gets-lucky premise, Díaz interrupts Oscar’s story and travels back fifty years to Oscar’s mother’s childhood in Santo Domingo. This is at the height of the rule of Dominican despot Rafael Trujillo, and the country is wholly in the vise of what Díaz refers to as the Trujillato, the cruel, greedy, and capricious military and political organization that grew from the dictator’s authority. Oscar’s grandfather, a member of the landed upper-class relatively left alone by Trujillo on the condition of money and obedience, has the misfortune of raising a brood of attractive daughters in a city where attractive daughters are considered possessions of the state. When he refuses to showcase the girls at government functions, thereby denying Trujillo’s seigniorial privileges to them, he invites the dictator’s wrath, and the Trujillato falls murderously on him and his family.
Trujillo may be long dead when Oscar goes to Santo Domingo, but the system of abuse and corruption he legitimized is very much still de rigueur, though it might not be visible to weekend-tripping Americans. Yvón, it turns out, is the kept woman of a police captain, “one of those very bad men,” Díaz writes, “who not even postmodernism can explain away.” This is a country where “they call a bullet a cop’s divorce,” and for his attention to Yvón Oscar is savagely beaten by the captain’s heavies and then promptly flown back to New Jersey by his frightened family. The beating dwarfs any of the intimidation Oscar received in high school or college, and leaves the left side of his face partially paralyzed.
Yet this is the bullying that Oscar finally stands up to. To the horror of his family, he flies back to Santo Domingo and continues to woo Yvón, who is terrified and amazed. Now Yunior’s sleeping around (he had been a stud in college) seems wasteful and pathetic, the boys who taunted Oscar and the girls who disdained him shallow, the heartless rule of force in the Dominican Republic barbaric. A story about a fat kid trying to get laid has grown into a novel about love, defiance against organized brutality, and heroism.
* * *
So The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is a book with admirable aspirations, charismatic writing, and a moving, memorable finish. It’s uncommonly wise, it features an undiluted and original voice, and it courses with life. But it’s also loose and unsure of itself and a great deal of its latent power escapes through the cracks of a creaky construction. What’s surprising is that, given how many years it’s been on the drafting table, the novel feels decidedly thrown together, almost hasty.
As we know, its central story was completed but for minor changes in 2000. Díaz added to that the episode with Oscar’s grandfather, to gain historical breadth, parallelism, and irony. He also added a section narrated by Oscar’s sister Lola, and this is very long and sensitive interpolation (indeed, Díaz so strains for sensitivity that Lola is the least interesting and flattest character in the book) that has no essential relationship to the plot. An introduction has also been inserted, a lot of gratuitous vamping about a Dominican folk curse called fuku, that both Díaz and the reader immediately forget about. And most egregiously, Díaz has attempted to give his readers a primer in modern Dominican history with the extensive use of footnotes.
This is especially frustrating. There was a time, before they became a mindless writer’s workshop vogue, that footnotes in fiction had a modicum of artistic merit. When David Foster Wallace used them to ludicrous excess in Infinite Jest at least there was a pointed aesthetic effect, even if that effect was goading and unrewarding. But their only point for everyone after, and most certainly for Díaz, is that they are easy. In writing a historical novel, as Díaz has, the fundamental art is in integrating necessary factual history into the narrative without obtruding on and dispelling the fabric of the invented world. Díaz has decided that his readers need to know about Trujillo’s legacy if they’re going to appreciate his story (there’s also a pedagogical impulse here: he’s irked that Americans are so thoroughly ignorant about Dominican history); but instead of revealing that history through the story—that is, doing a novelist’s job—he’s simply stapled the information onto the narrative in these sloppy, indiscriminate footnotes. It’s pure laziness (and it’s doubly upsetting because Díaz is a writing teacher and surely recognizes when his students are trying to get away with short cuts) and it has a distracting, depleting effect throughout the book.
The sense the reader ultimately gets is that Díaz was ambivalent and tentative about this novel even as he corrected its final proofs. Given the pressure, that’s understandable—and to some extent the reader shares Díaz’s relief in finally getting this book over with. Now hopefully, he can work assured in the knowledge that producing great books is, for him, less a matter of chance than of perseverance. And the rest of us can happily settle in to the regular habit of reading him.
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Sam Sacks has written books reviews for Pittsburgh Pulp, The Tucson Weekly, The New York Press, The Las Vegas Weekly, Columbia Journal of American Studies, freezerbox.com, and thefanzine.com. He lives in New York City.
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12 Comments currently posted.
Dee Brown says:
Justin Hickey says:
While your critical analysis is spot-on, this one holds a special place for me. Yes, he’s exhausting and lazy, but the shimmering confetti of his nerd-props just charms me to pieces. “For simplicity’s sake, we’ll call them Solomon Grundy and Gorilla Grood.” Priceless! What I’m most happy with, on an even more personal note, is that this book completely erases the nastiness from my mouth of “Fortress of Solitude.” That thing, an unabashedly wandering trainwreck of hipster uselessness, gives comic readers a bad name. Diaz redeems them.
Max says:
You say (or words to that effect) that the washed-up oldsters should step aside. Sure they should, if they’re washed-up. But what about the junk written by the hordes of MFAers who have spent their lives in classrooms? What do they know about anything?
Though from the Dominican Republic (which he has milked to his advantage), Junot Diaz has spent his life in the upper stratum of the literary world. Six years in college (an MFA from Cornell); creative writing instructor at MIT; long-time fiction editor at the Boston Review (where he publishes other MFAers).
His stories, of course, appear in the Best American anthologies. Almost all the stories there are by MFAers who made the right connections. I was part of a short story discussion group, and we used Best and O’Henry (among other books — if we didn’t use other, better anthologies, I would have quit long before I did). The two outstanding stories I read — stories that went deep — were Alice Munro’s “Silence” and William Trevor’s “The Dressmaker’s Child.” And you mention those two writers as oldsters who should just hang it up.
Edwin Rivera says:
Max: Well said. Everyone else, including the writer of this overwritten dreck, or should I say false encomium for the false hope of literature, should go write back to the classroom. Let me tell you this now: Mr. Diaz is not the bright and shining hope of American, Latino, Diasporic, or whatever the fuck literature some strange-brained pedant wants to call it. Diaz’s book was shamelessly sloppy, recklessly structured, often silly, poorly elucidated (has he ever BEEN to Paterson? Not even a description of a street, a scene, nothing, all parsed and anything of consequence swept screamingly away by the highballing trainwreck of his style. Diaz should be embarassed, chagrined, and, frankly, he should retire back into the halls of academe in which he evidently feels quite comfortable, because novel-writing is not his forte. How do you trust a writer who speaks Harvard one second, and turns on the street-slang the next? What is this guy, a split-personality? There is a stench in the air . . . and it is called tokenism.
Florence Robertson says:
I don’t consider myself young or old but am quite sure that I would fit in either category depending on who’s judging. Does that make my sensibilities idyllic or out dated? Who’s to say? One thing I have to say to Junot is; “Stereotyping is not only odious but quite immature. I’m not suggesting that you should aspire to be old but, come on, grow up a little. And, another thing, being a native of the USA, I am thrilled by the people and cultures of other places, I would love to read of a writer who expounds on the dignity of the people and the beauty of the places they come from. I want to share in the experience and treasures they bring as immigrants to this or any other country. Please stop imposing the crusty surface of the same people and places on us. Shock me please with that sort of story. I’m sorry Junot but I find your writing tragically mundane.”
Ysabel Mars says:
My God! And these are people that love literature? No wonder reading grows endangered. Really, I’m speechless. Mr. RIvera your comments speak more anger than sense. You say: how do you trust a writer who speaks Harvard one second and turns on the street slang the next? I guess that means we should not trust Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Ralph Ellison, Sandra Cisneros, Edward Rivera, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy to name a few who made a career out of mixing registers both in their fictions and in their regular life. Mr Rivera seems to dream of some pure identity that doesn’t exist on any planet. Should Mr Diaz only speak Taino and eat only cassava, would that be ‘pure’ enough, ‘authentic’ enough for you? I grew up with Junot Diaz; he delivered pool tables for thirteen years, putting himself through Rutgers with the money he earned. He worked second jobs nearly all the time, including stints at Raritan River Steel. Have you ever lifted slate from a pool table, Mr Rivera? Have you ever worked at a steel mill? Long before Diaz was teaching at university (and hello, there’s nothing wrong with that!) he was working like an animal to make his dream reality. You, Mr. RIvera, make comments without knowledge; you pass your biases and half-brained assumptions off as arguments. Mr Diaz is a Caribbean immigrant, of mixed African descent who grew up in New Jersey. His mother worked in factories her whole life, his little brother is a Marine combat veteran, his older sister spent many years in prison. What do you know about him or his life? You act like you do, but you really don’t, do you? And why should anyone who writes a book like Oscar Wao feel embarassed or chagrined? Diaz tried something beautiful, what have you done? As for Ms Robertson who finds Mr Diaz’s writing tragically mundane–good for you. But clearly not everyone shares your opinion. OSCAR WAO has been picked by Publisher’s Weekly, Amazon, New York Times, New York Magazine, LA Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Booklist as one of the best books of the Year. The National Book Critics Circle named it the mostly highly recommended novel by its members, not exactly a bunch of dummies, those NBCC people, or famous for supporting people of color out of hand either. Back to Mr. Rivera: Mr Diaz’s hybridity disturbs you? It’s true: Diaz doesn’t try to hide behind any ridiculous notion of authenticity; he tries to be all the parts of who he is; the parts that worked in steel mill five days a week, the part of him that delivered pool tables full time in order to put himself to college and the part of him that had a 12th grade reading level by the time he was in sixth grade. The part of him that grew up in sight of the largest active landfill in NJ. The part of him that got punched out by his father every couple of days. The part of him that read every single book in his school library. We can’t trust a person who has more than one aspect to his personality? Rubbish. Who, I would argue, we SHOULD NOT TRUST is someone like you Mr Rivera who would make such odious claims, who would undermine a positive artist of color because he refuses to hew to identity formulas that were outdated twenty years ago. On a final note: I don’t think Diaz’s book is lazy at all or sloppy. The Reviewer misunderstands the role of the footnotes in the novel. They are not there to provide history, as the Reviewer claims, for Americans. (Mr. Diaz book follows the Morrison line; write neither for whites or against but make them irrelavent .) Most of the information in them is intentionally distorted. If you know anything about Dominican history you would actually see that they’re not meant to be authoritative at all. The author’s not being sloppy or lazy’; he’s trying to saying something about the dictatorship of writers. The footnotes are there as a second voice, a second text, a counter weight to the dictatorship of the main text.
To wrap up: the negativity and evil of some of these comments is really disturbing. Person attacks against a writer based on absolutely nothing. Who I find tragically mundane are some of these writers, who risk nothing themselves but who love the tear down those who do.
Dana Diaz-Matthews says:
Ms. Mars, Clearly you DON’T know my brother at all. Who the hell told you that his older sister spent half her life in prison? I am his older sister and I don’t ever remember spending “one” day in prison in my entire life! Unless of course my brother has another older sister I don’t know about. I find it appalling that you would make such a statement without knowing your facts first hand. perhaps you should call me and we can have this discussion with my attorney since you have decided to make such a bold comment/statement on this media. For your information, I happen to a wife, mother and a well educated business woman. Trust this, I will find you. I promise you I will.
edwin rivera says:
It is heartening to see that my remarks have provoked such ferocity–though of a limited kind, concerning the meager intelligence with which it was divulged. Are those words too big for you, Ms. Mars? Or should I shrink my vocabulary to accomodate the size of your IQ? Apparently, judging by what Ms. Diaz-Matthews has to say about herself and your obvious libel, what are we to take away as actual fact from your lengthy diatribe? So you say that Mr. Diaz delivered pool tables for thirteen years. It is my understanding that he published his first book of short stories, DROWN (a collection which I liked, Ms. Mars, though I did not love it, finding it sorely lacking in most instances when it came to character and plot and turn of phrase) when he was twenty-seven. Do you mean to tell me that he continued delivering pool tables until he was well into his thirties, while teaching and editing and writing and (gulp) still working in a steel mill? Or did he begin delivering pool tables when he was thirteen years old? Is this what you are telling me? Perhaps you should march straight to the source to get the skinny on this one, because it’s a real head-scratcher far as I’m concerned. And as for working in a steel mill, I cannot discount this for I know only the bare bones concerning his work history, but I have to wonder in what capacity he was employed, because first-hand knowledge of physical labor (aside from delivering pool tables) never shines through in his work. What kind of steel did he work with? Was he a union member? Which local did he belong to? What, exactly, did he do in the steel mill? These are questions that should be irrelevant for it is the writing that always matters, but since you, and Mr. Diaz himself, insist on touting these as facts in order to piece together the portrait of the artist as the struggling persona, then they become part of the public debate whether you like it or not.
To make things easier for you to understand, Ms. Mars, here are some bullet points, a much-needed lesson if you will for a maligning individual:
Diaz is Caribbean, of mixed African descent: This does not excuse poor prose and ramshackle storytelling.
Diaz read every single book in the school library: That’s what writers are supposed to do.
Diaz worked through college: Who the hell didn’t?
Diaz grew up near a landfill: If you’re from New Jersey, this ain’t exactly news.
Diaz got punched out by his father: He ain’t the first and he aint’ gonna be the last.
Diaz’s mother worked in factories: See above and alter the gender.
Have I ever lifted slate off a pool table: No, like most of the population. But I was in the Steelworker’s Union, and I know what it is to eat shit and sweat blood, which is all the info you need on me, Ms Mars.
But back to the writing, which is paramount, not personal attacks (for, as it turns out, you are the assailant, Ms. Mars, not me, for I had not gotten personal in previous commentary). Anyone who read your commentary could see that it is your own writing that you must seriously examine, Ms. Mars. Perhaps you should consult Strunk and White before you decide to come at me with a pseudo-intellectual broadside, and perhaps you should actually read the novel you are so bravely defending. But since you haven’t, I am forced to elucidate exactly what is wrong with Diaz’s novel, and I will do so by examining the first thirty pages, and all for your benefit. See how fortunate you are, Ms. Mars? I’m taking time out of my busy life to set you–and the mainstream critics you so passionately espouse– on the right path, all the while husbanding my own energy.
Did you notice the play on words, Ms. Mars? Yes, that is what real writers do.
Immediately on the very first page of Diaz’s novel, the discerning reader notes that he has an annoying fondness for capitalizations, a la Emily Dickinson or Thomas Pynchon in MASON AND DIXON. Where in the work of the aforementioned authors the capitalizations are a sign of their style and historical accuracy respectively, this serves no narrative purpose other than to boldface the axiomatic in BRIEF AND WONDROUS LIFE. It is the very style of the author/narrator that should be the marker of forcefulness; the ring of words will sound in the reader’s skull if chosen wisely. Diaz’s proclivity–prevalent throughout the novel– informs the critic that the writer does not trust his reader, for he must shout out every landmark on the long journey novelward, like a hamfisted tourguide for the hearing-impaired.
What also strikes the critic is the narrative voice. The question begs: Who, exactly, is speaking? The voice alters constantly, using words like “colloquially” and “apotheosis” before switching gears and calling the reader a “nigger” and talking about “you and yours.” The narrator insists on browbeating and berating the reader, which, to anyone with the sensitivity level of, say, Godzilla, would find to be importunate behavior to say the least. After all, you came to the show to be entertained and enlightened, not to be made fun of. The narrator also has a habit of summoning up references to comic books and fantasy fiction, channeling the spirit of Oscar Wao and simultaneously refuting Wao’s personality, as if the narrator can’t decide whether he wants to be rigorously academic, streetwise, or just plain dorky–which makes absolutely no sense as we read onward, for we soon discover that the narrator, for the most part, is a young man called Yunior. He is a cipher more than an actual full-blooded character (for what makes him so interesting? that he woke up one day with blood pouring out of his nose, late in the novel, as we readers are expected to believe that he’s been a habitual coke-user, or, to use the parlance of our times, “has been fucking it up big time?” that he’s–shocking news in Diaz’s world–a womanizer? that he got beat up walking the streets one night, a background scene injected for no reason whatsoever? who cares about Yunior? what’s at stake for him? is Diaz so lazy that he couldn’t call forth the energy to conjure a new character with heart and relevance, as opposed to recycling a narrator he’d overused nearly a decade ago?)
The head shakes sadly.
And the footnotes, which Ms. Mars claimed were a “a counter-text,”– am I supposed to swallow this bit of nonsense whole-hunk because she probably read Mr. Diaz’s professorial explanation of his own novel? They are longueurs in a novel that contains far too many longueurs as is–the dull exercises in history (as if he was the first author to parse Latin American dictatorships–he never read Eduardo Galeano? never even saw that horrid cult film EL TOPO, which features a caricature of Trujillo?) that he struggles to make entertaining through the use of expletives and the insertion of Spanish slang. In writing, it is easy to create a metaphor utilizing pop culture or a foreign language (”knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan Lee,” or, “flyest guapa in Paterson, one of the Queens of New Peru”) as opposed to taking language and trying to stretch and bend it to your will, to twist and flip and rubberband it until it spins out into a new evanescence and is coined into a new and hard-won metaphor, a treat for the readers and a real sign of the writer’s mastery. This, unfortunately, is a skill that Diaz does not possess. He lacks the concrete descriptions that make or break a narrative, and this is is one of his major faults as an author, one unforgiveable in a novel that is supposedly entrenched in “the mean streets of Paterson, New Jersey.” We know we are there because the narrator tells us, but we are not given interesting descriptions of the people on the streets, the streets themselves, the buildings. We are never shown what separates Paterson from every other city in New Jersey–in the nation, for that matter. What of Peruvians? Are there other Latin-Americans? The street vendors and hustlers? The amazing characters that make up a real city anywhere in the world? Where are the Palestinian neighborhoods? (Thanks Ian). This novel may as well have been based on Mars (where Ms. Mars currently resides, having seen much to admire in this novel).
And let’s not forget the egregious comments, which are supposed to come off sounding smart and stinging, but really are offensive if examined closely: “Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.” Really, Mr. Diaz? There were people stepping on land mines every day, children getting their arms blown off, suicide bombers storming into cafes and bunkers and sending body chunks everywhichway? You’re telling us this? I wonder what the families of the slain victims overseas would think.
But still, surprisingly enough, none of this can come close in egregiousness to the very debacle that is the Oscar Wao character himself, a boy who speaks in an annoying and unrealistically oracular tone that would make anyone want to clobber him (”You were thirteen and your mother allowed you to date a septuagenarian?” and, “I do not move so precipitously” are just a few samples of the verbal nuggets Diaz tosses off at Oscar’s behest–and this from a character who says, in strangely poor English for one with such an astounding vocabulary: “What more sci-fi than the Santo Domingo? What more fantasty than the Antilles?”). This is a boy who mysteriously happens to work in a lumberyard on page 30. doing Lord only knows what, forcing the reader to puzzle over this information as we take into account Diaz’s revelations of nerdy humilations and tortured blubber, a boy who engages in a prolonged, sappy, and thematically inconsistent relationship with a Dominican prostitute who will be the eventual cause of his demise, not to mention the odd apparition known as the golden mongoose who serves as a deux ex machina, a shimmering distraction that begs to be shot at its first appearance since it is so geographically misplaced. If absolute messes are masterpiece, then this novel is the Nobel clincher.
The errors and miscalculations, the sheer clunkiness, are nearly boundless.
I could make up a whole number of fallacies to excuse the inexcusable linking of sentence structure and glaring lack of rythm (e.g., “Which explains why everyone who tried to assassinate him always got done, why those dudes who finally did buck him down all died so horrifically. And what about fucking Kennedy?” –pg. 4), and the veritable cornucopia of cliches (”One final note, Toto, before Kansas goes bye-bye”– pg. 6; “In those blessed days of his youth . . . something of a Casanova”– pg. 12) Am I to respect a novel that propogates all of the cliches thrown at Latino culture? That we are all womanizers, junkies, wife-beaters? That all the women stop traffic by virtue of their plump asses?
And since when is a Dominican-American nerd an oxymoron? How about a Swahili-speaking African?
No, I don’t hold with novels that demolish character and contrive plots, that plow through all sense and sense-making and create in the mind the jangling noise of a railcar pile-up, that offer up a smoking pile of detritus for a reader to sift through. Rife with terrible jokes and racist banter (is there no one that will call Diaz to account for his profligate use of the word “nigger?”), malicousness and just plain snarkiness (his attack on Mario Vargas Llosa, the novelist from Peru whose skills far outmatch Diaz’s own, is embarassingly feeble; Vargas Llosa must have felt the feather of Diaz’s pen across the hemisphere, just enough to laugh at the tickle), it all seems to have been typed up in a white panic at the eleventh-hour, in sweat-dot terror that the knock on his door would be from his publisher, demanding a portion of the proceeds be returned due to contractual negligence. The paltry offering in the December 07 issue of the New Yorker, “Alma” is proof of this proposition: a writer rehashing old themes, trying to provoke a wolf whistle out of a dead squirrel.
Yet,the mainstream periodicals did praise the novel to the point of paroxysm. Examine these closely, for in each one you will recognize the same line of thought, quotes that parallel and align, as if the critics were cloned specifically on the eve of this novel’s birth. Even A.O. Scott, in his review in the New York Times, seemed to tapdance around what he really wanted to say, which arouses all the more suspiction. Also, consider this: Why haven’t Harpers Magazine (which ripped up Denis Johnson’s National Book Award winning-novel TREE OF SMOKE to absolute shreds with sense and intelligence) and the New York Review of Books ever touched upon Diaz’s books? Surely a novel that made so much noise in 2007 would have merited a few lines to fill their pages.
When intellectual honesty and honest criticism go out the window, it’s time to pack the bags and go out on a permanent lunch, because if there is no criteria for excellence, what is the point in even making the attempt?
Chew on that, Ms. Mars, but chew slowly. I wouldn’t want you to choke.
Florence Robertson says:
Bon Appetit Mr Rivera! What a delightful chew. I savored every literate morsel. What a well educated and cultural review. I enjoyed your assessment of the story and author immensely. I am completely satiated.
edwin rivera says:
Thank you! I was beginning to feel unappreciated.
Tomas Bobadilla says:
Mr. Junot Diaz if you are interested in the greatest story never told, please contact me at TUBOTOM@HOTMAIL.COM and let me know if you would like enough information on a subject to win three more pulitzers.”Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced”.
junot diaz contact says:
[…] possible to be, enormously … contact us to receive electronic notification of each new issue: …http://openlettersmonthly.com/issue/junot-diaz/It&39s a scary time for Latin American immigrants, and writer Junot …Apr 22, 2006 … junot diaz […]
Growing old is every bit as interesting as growing up. But how can you know that until you do?