choices

“Take me somewhere, says the reader.  Anywhere.  But don’t remind me—with too much description or analysis or thinking or interruptions—that I’m reading.”  This opinion, as expressed here by Heather Sellers in her textbook The Practice of Creative Writing, is a common one.  John Gardner argued the same thing in his The Art of Fiction, saying that fiction must create a vivid and continuous dream for readers.  But I don’t read that way.  When I read, I see words not pictures, not images.  I don’t imagine myself as the main character or vicariously experience their emotions.  Perhaps I should.  Perhaps I’d be a better writer and better person if I read that way.  But I don’t.  I read words and sentences and paragraphs and scenes and narratives and plots and chapters and books and oeuvres.  The interest for me lies in these things, in the ways that meaning is built up out of these sundry parts.

Apparently, Junot Díaz is the same kind of reader because he is certainly that kind of writer.  In The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the narrator, who bears a strong resemblance to but should not be equated with his author, repeatedly interrupts his narrative with asides, history lessons, disquisitions, slang-fu, and allusions, lots and lots of allusions to comic books and science fiction, to all of that vast social wasteland that was pre-internet nerdery.  He seems to be doing this to satisfy the two impulses driving his novel: the desire to tell the story of the Dominican Republic in the twentieth century, at least from the rise of Trujillo to the dispersal of the diaspora, and to pay homage to the comics and science fiction that he loved growing up.  The weakness of the book lies in the distance between these two impulses.

Oscar Wao is the nickname of the ultimate nerd whose story this novel relates, with long sojourns into his ancestry.  He also, evidently incongruously, is Dominican.  Before reading this book, I had no idea that Dominican men were so inordinately fly that they spent all their time sexing up any and every available woman.  But that is what Junior, our narrator, suggests, which is why he finds the likes of Oscar, who makes it into adulthood still a virgin thanks to his “Hail! Well met” method of communicating and the unique overeating problem of the nerdly isolate, such a paradox and so worthy of having his story told.  If you don’t find this incongruity surprising, however, you might wonder if Oscar’s life is so wondrous if still brief.

Díaz, too, may have his doubts about the power and interest of his protagonist’s story, because he can’t stick with it.  Through Oscar and Junior’s voice (the latter being one of the two best things about the book) Díaz satisfies his impulse to honor his childhood lifelines.  But because Oscar is so atypical of a Dominican, he doesn’t allow Díaz to fulfill that other impulse, the one to tell the Dominican story.  Instead, he gets into the Dominicana through the story of Oscar’s mother and her father under Trujillo, through the story of the family and how they ended up dispersed from their Island home.  It is quite a tale of woe and superstition and political reality and it offers the best sustained narrative in the novel.  The diasporan Dominican as represented by Oscar, in contrast, gets short shrift.  We learn more about the diaspora through glimpses of Junior’s life and that of Oscar’s sister but since they are peripheral to the novel, the glimpses are incomplete and lack the depth and luster of the sections in the DR itself.

The failure of the novel, to the extent it fails in spite of it’s manic energy and many accolades and strengths, lies in this imbalance: the Dominican story as told here doesn’t do justice to the experience of the Diaspora, as it does for the earlier period, because Díaz’s chosen protagonist is only nominally a member of that group.  I understand why he was chosen, but that choice still weakens the novel.