Under pressure
Junot
Díaz received such a rapturous reception for his debut
collection of stories, Drown, in 1997 that it must have
scared the living daylights out of him. How to follow that? In
preference to knocking something out in a year or two, he has
ruminated, cogitated and gestated for a decade over his first
novel. Would the book have been any different if he hadn’t
taken such pains? Posterity will not care, of course, or even
remember the slow birth, but for a reader now it’s hard
not to have it in mind. Any consideration of the extra-literary
aspects of this book can’t ignore the cover (when do I ever?):
the US edition is clean and apt, while the UK (and Australian)
design, in an unusual break with tradition, is so bad with its
primary coloured faux naivety that its awfulness can only be the
result of concerted effort. Nobody’s going to be buying
this because it looks nice on their shelves. The pressure’s
on.
The title of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar
Wao is presumably a riff on Hemingway’s story ‘The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,’ about a man whose
rebirth from cowardice to courage is his downfall, and one could
tangentially link this to Díaz’s novel. Despite the
title, Oscar de León (the Wao is an accented version of
Wilde, which his peers use to mock him) appears only fitfully
in the book, in maybe a third of its pages, though it does begin
and end with him.
The bulk of the book delves instead into the lives
of his sister, his mother and grandparents, all by way of depicting
life in the Dominican Republic (DR) and among its diaspora in
the US. The shadow behind all their lives is the “portly,
sadistic, pig-eyed mulatto” Trujillo, the dictator who ruled
the DR from 1930 to 1961. Linked to this is the central idea of
a curse, or fukú, being upon the world: “it is believed
that the arrival of Europeans on Hispaniola unleashed the fukú
on the world, and we’ve all been in the shit ever since.”
It was believed, even in educated circles,
that anyone who plotted against Trujillo would incur a fukú
most powerful, down to the seventh generation and beyond. If
you even thought a bad thing about Trujillo, fuá, a hurricane
would sweep your family out to sea, fuá, a boulder would
fall out of a clear sky and squash you, fuá, the shrimp
you ate today was the cramp that killed you tomorrow.
You can see from this that Díaz is a writer
with a love of lists, and his style has the expansive fluency
that is familiar in a certain type of American literature. What
gives him a novel flavour is his kitchen-sink approach to the
language, chucking in everything from foreign languages (and context
wasn’t always enough here) to the tropes of sci-fi and comic
books. Oscar, you see, is not just an immigrant, but a geek:
Could write in Elvish, could speak Chakobsa,
could differentiate between a Slan, a Dorsai, and a Lensman
in acute detail, knew more about the Marvel Universe than Stan
Lee, and was a role-playing game fanatic. … Couldn’t
have passed for normal if he’d wanted to.
This is far from unique - there’s a definite
whiff of Salman Rushdie in places, and the sections where Oscar’s
grandfather falls foul of Trujillo reminded me of Louis de Bernières’
Señor Vivo and the Coca Lord, where torture and turmoil
are made almost seductive by the vigour of the prose - but Díaz
as a storyteller has considerable charm that gets him away with
a lot. Sometimes there’s a sense that he’s trying
to cram too much in: the book tries to be a family saga, a coming-of-age
story, and an immigrant account of “the inextinguishable
longing for elsewheres.” There is also an annoying number
of footnotes in Robert Walser-sized text, detailing the political
and cultural history of the Dominican Republic.
One interesting aspect of The Brief Wondrous
Life of Oscar Wao is who is telling us the story. This seems
to switch, so that at times we are in the hands of an omniscient
but personal narrator - “your humble Watcher” - which
may be Díaz himself, while at others Oscar’s schoolfriend
Yunior takes over, or in one section, a female I struggled to
identify. They all bring aspects of themselves to their direct
or distanced reports of Oscar, taking us from decades before his
birth right up to the ending which is dramatic, but not entirely
surprising. Well, it does warn you, as early as the front cover,
that his life is going to be brief.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
