The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao By Junot Díaz, Riverhead Books, Hardcover, 2007, 335 pages, $24.95
Since Junot Díaz dropped his debut novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, in late summer of this year, he’s gotten some pretty good (sycophantic) reviews. While I wish my review could offer something different, it won’t. It is hard to do anything but love a book that contains all the tragicomedy of a Sam Beckett play, plus a little bit of something else (call it outrage).
Here’s what it’s about:
When Christopher Columbus meandered into the Dominican Republic five centuries ago, the curse to end all curses, the fukú, was born, and since that day it has blighted hundreds of thousands— if you didn’t know, it assassinated JFK; it’s why Columbus himself died “miserable and syphilitic”; and it’s why the U.S. lost the Vietnam War. Oscar Wao is about the fukú.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is about the Trujillato, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina’s pitiless 31-year rule over the Dominican Republic. It is about subservience and resistance to a “portly, sadistic, pig-eyed mulatto who bleached his skin, wore platform shoes,” and demanded the virgin daughters of his subordinates. Oscar Wao is about oppression— what befalls those who resist, and what befalls those who run away. 1
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is about the Cabrals of Paterson, New Jersey, Beli, Lola, and Oscar. Beli wears prosthetic breasts; Lola likes Siouxsie and the Banshees; Oscar devotes all 280 of his pounds to nerdly endeavors (plays D & D and learns Klingon, all the while yearning to become “the Dominican Tolkien”).
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is about expectations, and what happens when we fall pathetically short. It is Oscar Cabral’s coming-of-age story, one in which his problem is basically that he is not “pulling in the bitches with two hands;” that, and a prodigious obesity, mark him as “very un-Dominican.” The two worlds he occupies, Jersey and Santo Domingo, seem to promise both a tragic death and a home simultaneously.
I would recommend this book, though, not because it’s a coming-of-age story, a tragedy, a comedy, and a history lesson all wrapped up in super-slick prose. Rather, I’d recommend it because of its narrator, Yunior.
In the novel’s narrator, the reader finds someone who shares Oscar’s nerdy interests in literature, shares his history, his culture, and maybe his curses; but who unlike Oscar has the sense to cover it all up in the hood. The book succeeds because Yunior emerges from the wreckage of the Cabral tragedy with a burden as heavy as the one Oscar must carry. Without Yunior, Díaz’ The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is just a very, very good story. With him, narrating such moments as Lola Cabral discovering a lump in her mother’s breast: “So you close your eyes and your fingers are pushing down and you’re thinking of Helen Keller and how when you were little you wanted to be her except more nun-ish and then suddenly without warning you do feel something. A knot just beneath her skin, tight and secretive as a plot,” it is fucking wondrous poetry.