My students thought
the story difficult to understand
because the writer
used pronouns rather than names
in too many places,
as if the writer’s job
were to placate readers’ expectations
rather than to create
a compelling
experience
an experience that might
include confusion.

My students found
the end of the story to be
unsatisfying
because we don’t know
what will happen
to the mother, to the baby,
except for one girl
who claimed the opposite—
that stories which resolve too neatly
fail to satisfy.

What organizes fiction is conflict—and only characers experience conflict, [so find] the dominating human conflict in your situation.

—Stephen Koch on how to find your story when writing.

I realize, reading this, that one thing that makes J. M. Coetzee’s work so unusual, and so powerful, is his understanding and depiction of humanity as decidedly unspecial.  Rather than anthropomorphizing non-human “characters”, he depicts humans as merely creatures like any other.

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.

One thing that Naipaul and Sontag share, besides a certain haughty austerity, is that they both came from humble beginnings to conquer their respective fields.  Perhaps when you must go against the grain and against tradition, you can’t afford the luxury of the slightest sympathy for the also-ran, lest you allow yourself to become one.  Certainly Sontag would believe so, that one must will oneself to greatness and anything that weakens one’s willpower, any acceptance of softness or mediocrity within oneself, dooms one to obscurity as a minor artist.

In criticism, Seligman claims that provocation and exaggeration are more important than truth and honesty, which goes some way to explaining how he misapprehends Sontag, who might sometimes practice the former but only in service to the latter.  He also writes that critics must narrow their vision to the art about which they write, but the magic of criticism is that reading the criticism may be as heady and rewarding an experience as seeing the art it describes.  Perhaps he is right, although he is too unthoughtful (or considers it a waste of his time) to explain how that might happen, how criticism can aspire to that level of greatness.  Instead, he merely asserts that Kael was a superior stylist, whose skill “deepen[ed]” with age but whose early work was even more rewarding and “human” in its “strain[ing],” to Sontag, whose writing is “narrow” and “constrained” if still “masterful.”

Again, we see that Seligman stacks his deck in order to raise up Kael, even for her shortcomings, while he pushes down Sontag, despite her virtures.  His entire conception of criticism and how it might transcend its subject matter serves to elevate Kael from the station of a reviewer of movies through a film critic to a great writer and critic.  He wants her to be great so he defines greatness in a way that flatters her.  He doesn’t dare argue against Sontag’s greatness, instead he spends his time denigrating her fiction, arguing that in her fiction she is not great.  Only in her criticism can she lay claim to greatness.